


The way of history

by vaguely_concerned



Series: Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse [30]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (it's very brief but just in case), Multi, POV Outsider, mentions of past alcoholism, non-graphic animal death, parental figures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 09:38:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18385838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: A year after the end of the Omnic War, Mariah Sanchez finds a strange boy in her backyard.Set in the Scoundrels and Thieves ‘verse, but could easily be read as a standalone!





	The way of history

The noise in the backyard happened at half past two in the morning, as Mariah McDougal Sanchez sat in the half-dark of her kitchen smoking a weary cigarette.

It was nothing that loud or remarkable, really — just an unexpected rustle and then a thump, like something soft falling to the ground. She paused with the cigarette halfway to her mouth, tilting her head towards the open window to listen closer, but there seemed to be nothing more.

It was probably some kind of animal and she’d feel like a damn fool standing there pointing a shotgun at a raccoon, she told herself. It was probably nothing.  

Mariah hadn’t reached the age of sixty one in this fucked up world by listening to things like ‘it was probably nothing’. They said the war was over, but she wasn’t risking any omnic stragglers bumbling around on her property.

She put out her cigarette. She got her boots on. She got the shotgun from behind the door, then the flashlight from the shelf, and headed out into the darkness.

Tightening her grip on the shotgun she rounded the corner of the house and closed in on the backyard, moving quietly. She stopped to get her bearings and wait for her eyes to grow fully used to the dark.

Then she heard it — swearing, mumbled and low but unmistakable and, dare she say, imaginative. Well, if it was a raccoon it was one with a very impressive vocabulary who hopefully didn’t kiss its mother with that mouth.

“Well hello there,” she said under her breath, zeroing in on the noise while staying in the shadow of the house herself. It seemed to be coming from somewhere near the shed, and a rustle of bushes helped her pinpoint it even better.

In the sparse moonlight seeping through the clouds she could make out a silhouette, a shape moving between shadows. _Bingo_.

“Stop right there,” she snarled, lifting the shotgun and turning the flashlight on to aim it straight at —

…a boy?

“Huh.” She lowered the shotgun, angling the flashlight to get a better look and then hastily turning it away again when he winced and shielded his eyes with a hand, hissing between his teeth as if in pain. “Well, shit. I mean, uh — snap. Darn.” He had looked to be no more than twelve, and old habits died hard, especially when they had been drilled into you by your wife’s meaningfully lifted eyebrows — Amy never had let her forget that one of their daughter’s first words had been an adorably cheery and high pitched _‘goddddammit!’_. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Don’t worry about it, ma’am,” he said thinly.

She aimed the flashlight beam low on his chest, so she could see his squinting face without blinding him. There seemed to be some kind of dark stain over the left side of his t-shirt. “The hell — I mean, what on Earth are you doin’ out here in the middle of the night, kid?”

“Uh. Well. Good evening, ma’am,” he said, clutching his arm awkwardly to his chest — his wrist seemed twisted in an odd way. “...I can explain.“

“I bet you can,” she said, walking over to turn on the light on the back porch, leaning the gun against the railing and leaving it there. “Come over here, would you, let’s talk where we can see each other.”

He didn’t move, rooted in place, something vaguely deer-in-the-headlights about him even without the flashlight beam in his face.

“Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble,” she told him. “What’s your name, kid? Don’t think I’ve ever seen you around town before.”

He didn’t answer, but after a quick glance over his shoulder as if to decide whether or not to take his chances and make a run for it, he stepped further into the circle of light around the back porch. As it turned out her interloper indeed seemed to be around twelve years old, small and slight, with a mop of brown hair that couldn’t have seen the attention of a pair of scissors in a year. Though he tried to stand half turned away from her and kept one arm close to his chest, there was no hiding that the dark stain on his clothes was blood.

Okay. No need to panic about it, she didn’t want to spook him. “I’m Mariah Sanchez. Kids around here call me Mrs. Sanchez, when they call me anythin’. This is my house. Uh. My farm.”

He stayed silent, just observing her like he expected her to make a sudden move.

She had no illusions about what she must look like to him — even before the ravages of middle age she had already been heavy set and graceless, her features rough-hewn and severe in a way that Amy, god rest her blind infatuated soul, had described as ‘ruggedly beautiful’ and ‘foxy as _fuuuuck’_ and quite a lot of other silly stuff besides, after a few glasses of wine. With her graying hair out of its braid, unshowered for close to a week now, and her eyes red shot with lack of sleep… if he worried she was some witch planning to lure him inside to pop him in a cauldron as stew meat, she wouldn’t blame him.

“...still feelin’ pretty bad about pointing a gun at you,” she admitted, scratching her head.

“Well,” he said, sounding vaguely defeated. “To be fair it is _your_ property. Suppose I should just count myself lucky that you didn’t actually shoot me.”

Giving a startled snort of laughter she rested her hands on her hips, trying to work this kid out. “Hm. Anyone you wanna call or ask to pick you up? You can borrow my phone, if you don’t have one.”

For a moment he looked puzzled at the question, then he glanced away and shook his head, shoulders slumped with exhaustion. That probably meant no parents, then, or at least none worth turning to for help. It wasn’t unusual these days; the war had been good at making orphans, as wars tend to be.

If there was no one he wanted to be rightfully returned to, she supposed she’d have to step it up for a moment. “Somethin’ wrong with your arm, son?”

Incredibly it looked like he was prepared to deny it, but then he shifted a little and flinched, clutching the arm tighter to his chest. After a while he admitted: “It might be kinda, uh. A little bit broken.”

“Oh, just a _little_ broken? That’s just the angle your wrist is at normally, is it?”

That got a half-hearted scowl out of him. “Yeah, okay, so it’s broken. What of it?”

“So… that can’t be very nice.”

He smiled, wry and weary and leaden. “Hah. Surprise, it ain’t.”

“You bleedin’ anywhere? Only, well.” She gestured to his t-shirt and he grimaced as if he’d hoped against hope she wouldn’t notice.

“Er, no.”

“...is there someone _else_ bleedin’ somewhere who needs help?”

After glancing over his shoulder again like he was starting to lean ever more towards taking his chances with the desert he shook his head slowly. “It’s from a few days ago now,” he offered finally, as if he left it up to her how badly she wanted to act on this information.

There was a sharp, hungry look about him, the bones pressing close under the skin of his face, the embers of a fever glowing dully behind his eyes. He looked tired, already beaten, in a way no child ever should.

She cleared her throat. “Y’know, I have a car. We could drive into town and go to the ER, have someone look at that arm.”

He blinked, bit his lip, shifted restlessly on his feet. He gazed down at his wrist, which was twisted in a way never intended by whoever had put down the design specifications for the human body.

“Uh,” he said eventually. “That would be mighty kind of you, ma’am. Thank you.”

She turned on the flashlight and brought them around to the front of the house.

“Here, lemme get you a coat or somethin’, you must be freezing,” she mumbled, ducking into the hall to get one of her jackets and the car keys. She draped the jacket over his shoulders, biting down on a smile as it rendered him pretty much a triangle with two skinny legs ending in ratty sneakers sticking out. “That okay?”

He gathered it around him with his good hand, glancing up at her. “...yes. Thanks.”

“Let’s get going, then.”

He was mostly quiet during the trip, only letting out bitten-down gasps of pain whenever a movement of the car jolted his arm — she did her best to keep the driving as smooth as possible, but it didn’t take much at all to make him flinch. Thankfully the ride into town wasn’t that long.

 

— — —

 

“Oh, Mrs. Sanchez,” the nurse behind the reception desk said as they walked in, perking up. “Of all people! Long time no see, how’ve you been, ma’am?”

It took Mariah a second to place the face, but then it clicked. “Sarah, right? Sarah Jennings? You used to ride Donny when you came to the riding center.”

Sarah beamed. “Sure, sure. Man, feels like a lifetime ago. How is the old boy these days?”

“Even older, but hangin’ on like a burr,” Mariah said. “Put out to pasture now, though, he’s earned some peace and quiet in his sunset years. Well, uh, we’re here about this young man.”

She waved at the kid, who was standing a little behind her and watching the conversation impassively.

As if realizing something was expected of him he said: “...hey.”

He tried for a wave with his good hand but grimaced and seemed to pale and think better of it as it jostled the other arm. Mariah gave a little wince in sympathy and, since he had steadfastly pretended not to hear her question about what exactly had happened to his arm in the car, said: “He’s done somethin’ to his arm there. Tried to take a horse out in the middle of the night by himself ‘cause I told him we’d have to wait until Friday to go riding. Kids, you know how they can be.”

Sarah Jennings, because she had five younger cousins and three children, nodded with conviction. She eyed his t-shirt dubiously. “And the blood?”

“Well, it ain’t mine,” the boy muttered, sounding uninterested.

“From the horse,” Mariah said, glaring at his profile. “Got a scrape in all the excitement. Nothing to worry about, but it looks pretty dramatic. Lotta blood in a horse.”

Sarah nodded, clearly not listening that closely as she started typing something on the computer. “Uh-huh, okay. Name?”

They looked at each other. “He’s my nephew,” Mariah said. “My sister’s youngest.”

The kid blinked at her in surprise, but only for a moment — he was quick on the uptake. “Jesse,” he said, “my name’s Jesse.”

“Jesse Sanchez,” Mariah said. The kid nodded, just this side of too vigorously.

“Right, right, your sister moved up north when she got married, didn’t she? Date of birth?”

He muttered a string of likely — and likely made up on the spot — numbers that lined up well enough with his looks that no one would think twice. It was much easier to get away with that kind of stuff now than it had been before the war; so many archives and registries and other vital information had been blown to so many digital smithereens by the omnics when they’d sought to destroy all lines of communication, early on. No one would lift an eyebrow if his file didn’t already exist in their system, it would have been more of a wonder if it had.

When they got to see the doctor she took an X-ray and assured them that it was a nice clean break, easy to get back in place, not to worry, which is the kind of shit doctors tell you even while your hand is jauntily tilted at a viscerally _wrong_ angle. They did something with one of those new fashioned nano-whatsit machines and made him lie down in it, new and sparkling white where it stood looking like a sleeping pod from an old sci-fi movie, or perhaps a very high-tech open casket. You could see the kid’s whole body sag with relief as bone started the process of knitting back together and painkillers were administered into the bloodstream. Once he climbed back out and the doctor finished putting the fiberglass cast on his arm the boy stood there like he was seriously considering the merits of just lying down on the floor and passing out. In the end he did a convincing impression of a horse sleeping on its feet while Mariah filled out some paperwork. At least there was nothing to pay these days; they’d introduced free universal healthcare almost thirty years ago now, just in time for her dad to die without it and both her kids to be born into it.  

She touched his shoulder when she walked over to him again, and he jumped, glancing at her like some small wild animal driven into a corner.

 _Yikes_.

“Feelin’ better?” she said, pulling back her hand as slowly and non-threateningly as possible.

“...yeah,” he said, the circles under his eyes dark as bruises now.

“Keep the cast dry and clean and the arm still a week and a half and it should be fine,” Sarah Jennings said as she followed them back out into the entrance hall, distracted as her attention shifted to a young man who was vomiting blue into a plastic bag over in the corner and stank of booze even at this distance. Ah, youth. “Come and see us again then, and we’ll get rid of the cast. And get some rest and plenty of fluids for that fever.”

“Week and a half? That quick?” Mariah asked. Back when Louisa broke her arm trying to jump a fence she’d had to wear a cast for more than six weeks — but then that had been almost twenty years ago now. She kept forgetting, some days.

“Just to be on the safe side.” Sarah shrugged. “Give the researchers a couple more years to work on it and we’ll probably have smaller things like broken bones fixed overnight. Pretty cool stuff.”

Mariah whistled under her breath. “Well damn — arn. Darn.”

In hindsight there had been a lot of wounds there the last ten years. Made sense that people had worked out better ways to treat them. It was the way of history, though to be fair it was also the sort of process that had — on the opposite end of the scale of medical sophistication to these nano-things — forced people to discover that getting maggots in a wound wasn’t always the unmitigated downer you’d expect it to be, considering they ate away the necrotic tissue and lowered the risk of infection. FDA approved and everything. You had to roll with the punches sometimes, she supposed.

“Well,” Mariah said, glancing at the boy to find he was already watching her intently. “Guess we’re out of here, kid.”

 

— — —

 

She got the boy back in the car and safely buckled in.

“Headin’ back to the farm, then,” she said as she settled in the driver’s seat, leaving a questioning pause to give him the opportunity to protest or ask to be taken somewhere else. When he just nodded mutely she started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, driving down silent empty roads on the way home.

“That your real name you told her in there?” she asked after a while.

He was quiet for a long time, watching the street lights as they passed. “Yeah,” he said. “My name’s Jesse. Jesse McCree.”

“Well, then. Good to meet you, Jesse.”

In her peripheral vision she noticed the quick darting of his eyes towards her.

“Listen,” she said. “I don’t know what you were doin’ out there before, and honestly I don’t really care. You were in a bad way and you need somewhere to sleep tonight. I got more room than I know what to do with. We could strike a deal here.”

“What do you want from me?”

She flicked a quick glance at him before concentrating fully on the road again. “Huh?”

He was watching her with a sort of dull impersonal distrust. “You said a deal. So a two way street. What do you get out of it?”

Drumming her fingers against the steering wheel and wondering where the hell this kid had been before, to react to an offer of sleeping with a roof over his head like he was having to read the fine print on a business contract with the devil, she said: “Hm. How ‘bout this: you don’t steal anythin’, set fire to anythin’ or try to slip away before we’re sure your arm’ll be okay, and we’ll call it even. How does that sound?”

“Like you’re still not gettin’ too much out of it.”

She laughed. “Ah well, what can I say. I ain’t never had too much of a head for business. Though I’d counter with the fact that I ain’t losing too much over it, neither.”

“You had to drive me all that way in the middle of the night.”

With a shrug she said: “What should I have done, let you go on your merry way with your wrist dangling all broken like that? Pardon me for saying so, but you look…“ _Like absolute shit_. “Pretty rough. It’s nearly four in the godda — godforsaken morning. Just… at least grab a few hours of sleep when we get back to the house, give me some peace of mind.”

He seemed almost distraught by this, though she suspected he was tired enough that everything must seem vaguely distressing, breathing and blinking included. “...but _why_?”

“Tell you the truth, kid,“ she said, in the vain hope that honesty might be the best policy for once, “it’s mostly because if I’d just left you out there on your own, I’d have a hard time lookin’ at myself in the mirror tomorrow. No big mystery, really. There ain’t somewhere else you want me to take you, is there? Someplace safe?”

He pressed the fingers of his good hand against his forehead, like he was trying to physically push down a headache. “I — dunno. No. Maybe. I — I can’t, uh, _think…_ ” There were actual tears of exhaustion and frustration leaking into his voice now, though he was noticeably trying to hide it.

“Just for tonight,” she said, as softly as she remembered how. It felt foreign on her tongue; it had been a bad few years for gentleness. “Get some sleep when we come back, and we’ll see about everything else in the morning, huh?”

There was another busy silence where she could practically sense the crashing front lines and daring pincer maneuvers of the war he was currently waging with himself.

“...okay,” he said finally, slumping back in his seat, fatigue seemingly grabbing an unexpected dark horse victory in his internal battle. “Okay. Thank you, ma’am.”

She put him up in the guest room when they got home — letting him into Louisa or Sam’s old rooms seemed… she got the guest room ready, making the bed and airing it out a bit.

The only clean bedclothes she could find were the ones with the cartoon rockets, which Sam had loved above everything on Earth when he was seven and found acutely, world-endingly embarrassing when he was fourteen. They smelled musty now, old. She allowed herself only a few seconds of burying her face in them, trying to search out the smell of the fabric softener Amy had used to buy — they’d stopped making it after the war, just one of the many everyday casualties that should have stopped hurting by now.

“Here you go,” she told him when she was done, showing him in. “It ain’t the Ritz or anythin’, but it should do for tonight, at least.”

He sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed, looking gray around the edges with exhaustion. “Thank you.”

“You get some sleep,” she said. “My room’s the second door on the right, the green one. Just knock if you need anythin’. Night.”

“...good night, ma’am,” he said as she left.

 

— — —

 

Once she closed the door to their — to her own room behind her, she stood in the darkness for a while, listening to the familiar creaks and sighs of the old house. The clouds had cleared and the room was full to the brim with moonlight.

She half expected to hear the noise of light footfalls over the floorboards outside, the squeak of the stairs, rustling as cupboards and drawers were looked through, but nothing came. The sound of her heart seemed too loud in her ears.

“The hell am I doin’ here, Amy,” she muttered, pressing the base of her palms against her eyes and leaning back against the door.

The room didn’t answer her.

 

— — —

 

She found him on the back porch the next morning, perched on the steps down to the ground like a baby bird trying to decide if it was ready to take the plunge and try for its first flight. He must have heard her coming down the stairs, because he had already turned his head to watch her come over and lean against the door frame.

“Morning,” she said, her voice still raspy and deep with sleep.

“...hey,” he said, watching her like a hawk. He looked better today, less flushed and exhausted, but there were still dark circles under his eyes.

“You get some sleep? The arm still okay?”

“I — uh. Yeah. Thank you for askin’,” he said, falteringly. There was a long pause neither of them seemed to know how to fill.

She rubbed the back of her neck. It was a beautiful morning, the air chill and sweet still, the sun only just letting go of the vivid cloak of colors it had dragged in its wake.

“I’m making breakfast,” she said eventually, gesturing over her shoulder with a thumb. “You want some?”

A look of surprise flitted across his face. “Okay,” he said carefully. “Thank you very much.”

“This way,” she said, heading down the hallway towards the kitchen. He got up and followed her.

With him hovering behind her like that she suddenly realized what a chaotic travesty the hallway had become — it looked like a bomb had gone off in there. She’d gotten so used to it she’d just walked past the heaps of… _stuff_ that had accumulated in little piles of detritus all over without really seeing them, maybe only kicked them to the side if they got in the way. It had been a long time since she’d been worried about anyone seeing any part of her house.

“Sorry the place is a bit of a mess,” she hurried to say, opening a closet and shoving some of the random junk in there on her way past. “I’ll, uh. I’ll get to doing somethin’ about it one of these days.”

He gave a small uncertain chuckle, the kind of sound that means you don’t know what to say but want to show goodwill, or at least politeness. Once they got to the kitchen he hesitated on the threshold, looking around at the faded curtains and the battered fridge and the haggard-looking plants in the windows like he was entering a minefield.

“Just, uh, sit down, please,” she said, waving at one of the chairs by the table. “Put the pile of magazines in the window sill or somethin’ if it gets in the way.”

As he sat down she put the pan on the stove and got the eggs, butter and bacon from the fridge.

“You awake enough for some talking, or should we wait until after breakfast?” she asked, cracking the eggs into the pan.

After a while she got a guarded: “Sure. We can talk, if you want.”

She chuckled. “Don’t sound so trepidatious, kid, ain’t like I’m conducting an interrogation here. Though feel free to plead the Fifth if I ask somethin’ that’s none of my business, I guess. This is just me bein’ naturally nosy. And if there’s anythin’ you want to know about me, I’ll reserve the right to be evasive and unhelpful in turn.”

This drew a cautious little smile from him. “Fair enough. Shoot.”

The butter in the pan hissed and crackled as she added the bacon. “You know where your parents are?”

“Gone,” he said, a flat, expressionless statement of fact. Well, she’d figured as much.

“The war?”

He shrugged, then nodded. “Pretty much.”

“I see. Anyone else? ”

At that he actually snorted, a look of jaded bitterness no one his age should know moving across his face. “Nah,” he said simply.

Again, more or less what she’d expected. If a twelve year old decided that running pell-mell through the wilderness at night with a broken limb flopping about would be a prudent cause of action, they probably didn’t have anyone they thought could provide them with a better alternative.

“Okay. You like your eggs sunny side up or flipped?”

He stuttered for a second, as if caught off guard by the question, then said: “...either is fine? Thank you?”

She nodded, turning the heat down a bit. “Got it. So… were you headed somewhere in particular before, or was havin’ you stumble into my backyard like a tumbleweed just a fortuitous accident?”

He laughed a bit, moving restlessly on the chair. “Bit of both, I guess.”

“Got somewhere you’re working towards, at least?”

“Wasn’t so much a case of ‘towards’ as ‘away’, to be honest with you, ma’am,” he said, studiously pretending not to notice the questioning glance she sent him. Hm. Maybe best not to press him on it, he seemed ready enough to spook and run already.

“No real plan from here on, then, it sounds like,” she observed.

“I’ll… make something up,” he assured her, in a commendable attempt at bravado that couldn’t quite hide a forlorn little crack underneath.

“How d’you plan on dealin’ with that?” she asked, gesturing with a hand towards his left arm in its cast.

He glanced down at it. “ _Well_ ,” he said. “‘Plan’ might be an, uh, ambitious word for what I’ve got. I’ll figure something out, though.”

“You’re welcome to stay here, if you’d like,” she said, moving over to the stove again to tend to the bacon.

There was a crash from over by the table — she turned her head to find he’d toppled the salt shaker to the ground and was scrambling to retrieve it. He made an apologetic grimace and put the salt shaker back on the table, frantically steadying it as it wobbled; she shrugged cheerfully and waited for his answer.

“I — I don’t know ‘bout that, ma’am,” he said.

She gestured with the spatula. “Course, you can leave too, if that’s what you want. I’m not about to keep you here against your will. Just sayin’ the offer’s there, in case you need it.”

Getting two plates, glasses and cutlery she set the table, filling the glass in front of him with orange juice before setting off to cut some bread.

“I‘ll work,” he said quickly, turning on his chair to still face her as she moved. “Dunno much about farming or anythin’ like that, but I’m a quick learner and I’ve been around horses before.”

She shrugged, not looking up from the bread. She’d made up her mind the moment she saw that wan hopeless look in his eyes last night. “Sure, if you want. Could always use another pair of hands around the place. But you can stay here anyway, even if you don’t, so long as you don’t make trouble.”

He took this with a healthy dose of suspicion, downing his orange juice like he was afraid it would disappear on him if he didn’t strike fast enough, but without taking his eyes off her as she lifted the pan.

“Like I said. No one here but me now,” she said levelly, as she tossed the trivet down on the table and placed the pan down on it. “Not like I ain’t got the room. Big house like this for one foolish old woman? Makes no sense. One more person ain’t gonna hurt any.”

“But…” The corner of his mouth pulled down, his brows drawing together. “I — for how long are we talkin’?”

She gave another shrug, putting the sliced bread on a plate and placing it down next to the pan. “Long as you want, I guess. Not like _I’m_ goin’ anywhere anytime soon, anyway.”

There was that look of distressed, almost pleading bewilderment again, as if he just didn’t know what to do with what she was telling him.

“Well, there ain’t no hurry. You don’t need to make up your mind right this instant. Just have a think about it.”

“...you really don’t want to know what I was doin’ out there in the middle of the night?” Jesse asked skeptically, narrowing his eyes to study her expression.

She rested her hands on her hips and tilted her head at him. “I dunno, do I? The term ‘plausible deniability’ mean anythin’ to you, son? You were covered in someone else’s blood at the time, by your own admission.”

The beginnings of understanding dawned on his face. He gave a tentative half nod, the side of his mouth tugging up as she sat down across from him. “Well, ma’am. When you put it like that.”

“Good to hear we see eye to eye on this. Eat your bacon.”

The bacon was a bit blackened along the edges, actually, and the egg yolks were smeared and oily and somewhat unappetizing. Damn it, Amy had always made it look so effortless. Mariah had asked her to teach her, several times, but somehow whatever she made always came out sad and crumpled and scrunched up, periodically with scorched bits thrown in for variety. Amy used to assure her she made up for it in other ways, kissing her cheek as she took the spatula away from her for her own good.

“Uh. Sorry ‘bout the food,” she said sheepishly. “My wife was the one who did most of the cooking, never really got the hang of it myself.”

“‘S great, ma’am,” he said sincerely, between mouthfuls.

She gave a snort of laughter — perhaps her cuisine had finally found a stomach hungry enough to flatter it — lighting a cigarette and then hesitating. Shit, it had been a long time since she’d had guests over for meals. Living alone for five years had worn something down in her head, eroded some framework she used to have inside her. “...you mind if I smoke in here, kid?”

He shook his head cheerfully as he bore down on the next strip of bacon, barely missing a beat despite having to navigate his plate awkwardly with the one hand available to him.

Good, then. She leaned to crack the window open and sat turned towards it as she smoked, keeping him company while he ate more than eating herself.

“There’s yoghurt in the fridge, if you want some,” she said eventually, as his plate was nearing empty but his speed was showing no sign of slowing down into satisfaction. “Just make sure to check the best before date, don’t remember when I bought it.”

After a while the cat slouched into the room and went over to Mariah for a few obligatory scritches behind the ears before turning its attention to the new person at the table. It and the boy held gazes for a long time, and then, verdict apparently reached, it went over and started rubbing its face against his legs, purring as he leaned down and petted it. Mariah could barely believe what she was seeing.

“That cat hates basically everyone except my daughter,” she said. “It only tolerates me ‘cause I feed it. Consider yourself flattered, I guess.”

“I ain’t even sneaked you any treats yet, buddy, you should at least make me work for it,” Jesse muttered, smoothing his thumb over the cat’s head and being rewarded with more purring.

Mariah made herself a cup of coffee and drank it while he alternated between eating and giving in to the cat’s big soulful eyes and petting it.

“Well,” she said finally, getting up with a wince as her bad knee took the weight. “I’m gonna go do some work with the horses for a while. Just leave the dishes in the sink, I’ll get ‘em later. Come look for me around the stables if you need me.”

If he chose to use the opportunity to run away — well, she had presented him with another option, at least. Whether he took it or not was his business, and if he didn’t he’d at least have a proper meal in him.

 

— — —

 

To her surprise he didn’t run, not that day and not any of the days that followed.

Occasionally he would trail after her at a respectful distance through the day, like some lost duckling, and honestly she didn’t mind it, he was agreeable undemanding company even though she couldn’t shake the feeling of being scrupulously studied and dissected at every turn. Other days he disappeared from sight for hours on end and she’d find him tucked away in some strange corner with the cat in his lap, petting it as he watched the everyday activities going on around the place with a sharp-eyed attentive focus he immediately tried to cover over with a polite sheepish smile when he noticed her looking.

 _Huh. Weird kid._ Though she supposed getting the measure of the place before agreeing to anything wasn’t the worst call on his part.

She spent a few days clearing out the hall, sorting the trash from the useful stuff, first changing a light bulb that had been busted for three years now so she could see what the hell she was doing. The third day she’d whittled it down to a manageable level, most of the floorspace cleared except for a few big plastic bags stuffed away in a corner at the end of the corridor.

“Scrap metal was this pile, right?” said Jesse, who was doing his best to help out but seemed to find it difficult and clumsy with his one functional arm. He still looked tired — she wondered how much he slept, considering how constantly on edge he seemed, always watching and coiled up on himself like he needed to be ready to run at a moment’s notice.

“Yeah, just toss it on there, I’ll take it out later. Careful with your arm, now — y’know, it’s fine if you want to take it easy, I can handle this on my own.”

He shrugged, dropping the rusting bolts onto the pile. “Nah, I’ll help, it’s fine.”

She frowned at his back, uneasy. She hoped she’d made it clear enough that she hadn’t meant for him to have to earn his keep or anything when she offered to let him stay.

He was wearing one of her old t-shirts, comically oversized on him, because she hadn’t been able to get the dried blood out of his own shirt no matter what she tried. The resulting look reminded her of that week a four year old Sam had refused to wear anything but one of his big sister’s t-shirts, wrapped a curtain tieback around the waist and pulled a pair of Amy’s woolen socks up to his thighs because he ‘wanted to look like _history_ , Ma’, after Mariah had read him a picture book about medieval Europe. (It had been his grandfather’s hat and a neckerchief for a solid month before that, when she’d told him about vaquero and how his great-great-grandfather had been one, and a bed sheet wrapped around him and trailing all over the ground once he got wind of the Romans and decided to give being an emperor a shot. A visionary sort, their Sam; perhaps she should have seen his interest in acting coming already there.)

Ignoring the leaden weight in her chest by dint of long practice she kept sorting through the old paperwork she’d found under a raincoat, trying to figure out if any of it was important enough to keep.

“Uh, I found this? I don’t know what — aw, _shit_ , sorry,” Jesse swore, as the large plastic bag he’d been holding ripped and spilled some of its contents on the floor.

“Language, kid,” she said mildly, crouching down to pick some of it up. “Don’t worry about it, though, I needed to go through this anyw —”

She recognized what she was holding and came to a sharp stop. Turning the red glove around in her hands she remembered the day Amy had gotten this pair — it had been so long ago, when they were both still in college, a home-knitted gift from her aunt because she’d told her over the phone that their apartment building was so cold.

Oh. That was what the plastic bags piled in the corner were. Their things — Sam and Amy’s, their jackets and shoes and gloves and whatever other outerwear had accumulated over the years. There had been things from when Sam and Louisa were kids in there that she hadn’t wanted to look at too much before shoving it in with all the other stuff.

There was a sound like radio static in her head. She’d meant to deal with this years ago, but then she… hadn’t.

“Um. Is something wrong, ma’am?” Jesse asked eventually, looking so small and wary standing barefoot in her hallway.

She swallowed heavily a couple of times and managed a smile. “No. No, everything’s fine.”

He nodded slowly. Well, of course he knew she was lying. _Hah_. Smart _weird kid._

“Hm. Think this stuff might take a while to sort through, actually. Don’t need you to be here for that, really — there’s a holoset in the living room, if you want to watch a movie or somethin’,” she offered, waving in more or less the right direction. It seemed kinder to give him an out. “I can show you how to work it, if you’d like.”

“Oh,” he said, looking relieved. “Thank you, I’ll, um, I’ll figure it out myself, don’t worry ‘bout it.”

When he was gone she pressed her hand over her mouth and tried to remember how to breathe.

She found him asleep five hours later, curled up around a pillow and tucked into one corner of the couch as the credits of a movie made their stately journey over the holoset screen. The cast rested awkwardly on another pillow in a position that looked stiff and uncomfortable, but he was snoring quietly. When the credits ended and the screen went over to viewing history it turned out the kid had been watching spaghetti Westerns on his own battered holovid and had just brought the image up on the bigger screen.

Westerns, huh. Somehow she wasn’t surprised.

Putting a blanket over him she let him sleep a bit longer while she made dinner, only moving to wake him once it was ready to serve. He looked better now, the dark circles under his eyes finally fading completely, his face relaxed and open with sleep.

She gently shook his shoulder, pulling back as soon as his eyes slid open and he made a sound like a confused kitten. “Hey, kid. You want dinner?”

“Yeah, thank you,” he managed, blinking against the cold light of the holoscreen and doing as much of a whole-body stretch as the clunkiness of the cast allowed. He blinked in surprise as the blanket fell off him, and she kept her face blank as she turned around and went back into the kitchen.

“Saw you were watching a few Sergio Leone flicks before,” she said over the peas later, and his eyes flicked to her face, likely searching for any hint of condemnation in her tone because yeah, he probably was a little on the young side for those still. She didn’t care, though; presumably he’d seen worse in real life, growing up during the war, and it wasn’t like she was his mother.

Seeming to sense her indifference he nodded, struggling to pin down his peas with only the fork in his one functioning hand. “Yeah.”

“You like those, then?”

“Uh-huh, I always put ‘em on when I feel… I’ve seen them before, a couple of times,” he said, shrugging as if it were no big deal and not, as she would later find out, perhaps the most egregious understatement in human history.

“Watched them with my dad when I wasn’t that much older than you, he used to love ‘em. I always wondered why the desert looked so weird in those movies until I found out they were all filmed in Spain. Suppose that doesn’t really matter, though,” she added, at the small distressed twitch of the corner of his mouth. “They’re more about ideas than any real time and place, right? The landscape is just… set dressing for the story, and that works fine.”

Of course she hadn’t quite known the extent of how true that was before she went off to college, and by that time she’d been sort of grateful for that degree of separation in her fiction, since she’d had precious little romanticism left in her when it came to the real history of America. It was easier to enjoy stories like that if you considered them a sort of unintentional addition to the fantasy genre more than anything.

He looked at her for a long time like he’d never really seen her before. “Yeah, I guess that’s kinda true,” he said eventually, returning his attention to chasing peas across his plate but looking calmer now. “I like ‘em because it feels like… somewhere else.”

“I can see how that works,” she agreed. God, she was so bone tired, her body feeling like the blackened aftermath of a forest fire, nerves blanketed and weighed down with ash. She still didn’t know what to do with Amy’s old riding boots — they were a hair too big for Mariah to wear, but she thought that might be just Christine’s size. They were good solid boots. Amy would have been horrified with her if she simply threw them away. “Close enough to the real thing that the differences matter.”

At least Louisa had taken most of her things with her when she left.

“Yeah,” Jesse said.  

“You’re welcome to use the big screen again anytime you want, by the way. I don’t mind, I’m not watching the holoset much anyway.”

Jesse nodded.

 

— — — — —

 

After a week and a half they went back into town and got the cast removed, and lo and behold the arm was fine when it came away. The shit they could do with their tech-doodads these days — it made her slightly nervous to imagine what they’d come up with next. It was good that they could give people better treatment now, of course, but this type of tech always had another shadier side of the coin going on, and usually the public didn’t get to know about it until it went spectacularly wrong. You got to the point where you were sending tiny machines into people’s bloodstreams, and it was only a matter of time before something really fucked up turned out to be the logical endpoint of that process. She just hoped they wouldn’t come crying to _her_ when they had the nanomachine ghost of somebody’s nervous system walking around on its own.

(Amy had called her an incorrigible cynic once, shortly after they met, as they were delving deep both into the conversation and their second bottle of wine, then laughed when Mariah told her it came naturally from knowing too much about human history and a sweet innocent STEM major like her wouldn’t understand, playing around with starlight and magnets all day. Mariah had taken it all as a compliment, really — she’d been ecstatic that this beautiful brilliant girl had given her enough thought to glean even that much of her dingy interior.)

After leaving the hospital they used the opportunity to do some quick shopping while they were in town anyway, first getting some clothes for Jesse so he didn’t have to wade around in her hand-me-downs anymore. She went on a proper grocery run for the first time in a long time, on the reasoning that she couldn’t be responsible for giving the kid scurvy while under her roof. The stores were finally starting to return to normal again now, a bit over a year after the peace agreement, the barter economy that had been prevalent during parts of the war giving way to currency once more and the shelves slowly filling with food, though half the brand names were new and unfamiliar to her.

Then before they headed home she got him a phone, the same basic but functional and sturdy model as her own, and saved her own number as well as a few of the other people who worked on the farm before handing it over to him. He stumbled through a ‘thank you’ and she patted his arm and said: “Mostly so I know you’ve got it in case somethin’ happens. Call it an investment in my own peace of mind.”

This was the real test, she supposed, whether he’d take off now that he’d solved the problem with his arm. Oh well, again, if he did he’d be at least a tiny bit better off than he had been before stumbling onto her property. That would have to do, if it came to it.

That night Jesse sat curled up in a corner of the couch and watched one of his movies with the sound turned low while she sat in the opposite corner, going through some paperwork she’d fallen behind on. Once she was done she ended up gazing at the screen with him.

“...who’s the fella with the scar, then?” she asked eventually, squinting.

In hindsight she should, perhaps, have expected the fifteen minute dissertation that followed. Worth it for the split second his face lit up like a little sun, though.

 

— — —

 

“Hey, Jesse,” she called, knocking on the door to his room the next morning. “Got somethin’ to ask you, is it okay if I open this?”

“Uh,” he said, sounding newly awake and confused, “okay, sure?”

She opened the door and stuck her head inside, finding him pushed up on his elbows on the bed and squinting against the morning light, his hair a merry crow’s nest on his head.

“Some of us are goin’ out for a little ride in half an hour or so,” Mariah said. “You wanna come with? Now that your arm is okay again, I mean. Wouldn’t want you gettin’ cabin fever.”

He scrambled to get to his feet, standing there in an oversized t-shirt and the new pajama pants that were too long in the legs. “Yeah, okay,” he said, looking wide awake now, a light in his eyes.

“Well, then, good sir,” she said, giving a mock-bow and holding out her arm like she was a hotel usher guiding him through the door. “Let’s just grab some quick breakfast first and we’ll get going. Think there should be some boots in your size lying around.”

Christine and Celia, the girls who were most involved in the running of the riding school and who had their own horses stabled here, were already busily at work getting everything ready. Well, Mariah thought of them as girls, but she found herself doing that with any woman under fifty these days. Celia was twenty four and Christine was nearing thirty — Mariah was pretty sure Christine had been in the same class as Louisa in high school, actually — but they both had an outdoorsy and springy kind of energy that made them seem even younger. Or maybe they just made Mariah feel that much older and more ponderous in comparison, who knew.

“Hey, Mrs. Sanchez,” Christine said brightly, pushing the fringe of her straw-colored hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand and nodding towards Jesse, who was standing slightly behind Mariah. “I’ve been meaning to ask — who’s the kid?”

Jesse stiffened. Mariah turned to put her hand on his shoulder, as much to keep him from bolting off to god knew where as to provide encouragement — it felt like calming a spooked foal, or maybe a wary kitten. “My cousin Billy’s boy. His name’s Jesse, he’s staying here for a while. They got some trouble up there.”

“You told that nurse it was your sister,” Jesse mumbled, low enough that only Mariah would hear him.

“Both of these girls have met my sister’s actual children, but good on you for thinkin’ to keep your story straight, kid,” she answered quietly, then to the girls: “We about ready to saddle up and go?”

Celia glided past them on her way to the stables, giving a cheerful mock-salute. “Aye aye, whenever you want, Cap’n. Good to meet you, kiddo.”

“See?” Mariah said to Jesse, gesturing at the impudent slip of a girl. “This is all my gray hairs have earned me. Cheekiness and bein’ surrounded by children who don’t respect their elders.”

Celia made a protesting sound over her shoulder. “Aw, c’mon, you ain’t that old, ma’am. Barely even slowing down, you could still take on the rest of us with one hand on your back.”

“You tell that to my knees, girl,” Mariah murmured darkly, watching Jesse’s slow, tentative grin out of the corner of her eye. “Well, let’s get started, then. You said you’d been around horses before, know a bit about them?”

“Oh. Well, yeah, but, um,” he glanced at her in that way he had, like he was trying to gauge how she’d take what he was about to say. “No one really _taught_ me anythin’, as such. It was more a… ‘I hung around the ranch for a while until they got tired of me and chased me off’ sorta situation. If you see.”

“Hm.” She indulged in her own dark thoughts around this for a moment — perhaps his insistence that he’d gladly work made more sense now — then reached out and patted his shoulder. “Well, don’t worry, I’ll guide you through the saddling and everythin’ as many times as you need. Ain’t something to do half-assed ‘cause it could wind up hurtin’ the horse, but you can always ask me if you’re unsure about something.”

He nodded quickly, seeming relieved at her reaction.

She’d picked out a dark bay mare for him, the one she’d often used with kids who were a bit nervous at the prospect of getting up on horseback — Sonya was a peaceable and friendly yet not entirely docile creature, as even-tempered as any horse could be, considering they were always one loud sound away from their nervous systems melting down and turning them into a thousand pounds of panic bolting in the opposite direction. It would seem he’d been telling the truth about having been around horses before, or else he was simply a natural: he moved calmly and reassuringly between them, and she didn’t even need to tell him not to walk too close behind them.

“You can walk behind her, so long as you make sure she knows you’re there,” Mariah clarified anyway, illustrating by keeping her hand on Sonya’s hindquarters as she went over to the other side of her. “Remember, she can’t see you back here, so she might get startled if you just turn up all of a sudden. You don’t want seven hundred pounds of horse kickin’ out in surprise. ”

Sonya, who would probably barely twitch an ear at dynamite going off five feet behind her if there were some hay within easy reach, dutifully stood there as Mariah found the saddle blanket.

Jesse clutched the brush he’d just used to groom the horse, an action he’d performed with a conscientious focused attentiveness that had absolutely not charmed Mariah down to her core. “Was that okay, did I get all the hair and stuff? It won’t chafe her?”

“Yup, looks fine,” Mariah said, getting the blanket in place. “You did good. Now for the part my back doesn’t appreciate so much anymore,” she added in a mumble, going to get the saddle.

“Should I — ” he began, starting forward.

She gave a dismissive grunt as she lifted the saddle and flipped it over. “It’s practically the same weight as you and I ain’t got a stepladder handy, kid, don’t think that would be a good idea.”

He snorted. “Teach me to try to be helpful,” he muttered, and she chuckled as she flipped the saddle back over and placed it down over the horse’s back.

They finished saddling up and rode out, a slow leisurely stroll around the outskirts of the property that never went above a canter, Celia and Christine exchanging chirpy gossip the whole way.

Mariah, since she had always been achingly uninterested both in who was fucking who and who had said what about whose kid, lawn ornament or putting on airs, even before she got old and crabby, focused on Jesse instead. She kept her eye on him and found that yeah, he _definitely_ had done at least some riding before, steady in the saddle and light on the reins, comfortable enough that he leaned forward to pet the horse’s neck without losing his balance whenever they came to a halt.

“Doing okay there?” she asked him eventually.

“Uh-huh. You really own all this, ma’am?” he asked her, tilting his head at the landscape and sounding faintly awed.

“Some of it, sure,” she said, keeping pace with him. “Everything this side of that fence. Inherited it from my old man, and him from his dad before that and so on, for quite a ways back. We used to grow some crops back in the day — peppers, beans, that kinda stuff — but it’s not the _best_ growing land, so these days it’s mostly just the horses and renting out stalls in the stables and selling off the hay we don’t need for ourselves, now that the fighting’s stopped and people are buying again.”

Jesse absent-mindedly ran his fingers through Sonya’s mane. “Huh. Makes sense, I guess.”

“During the war we grew some food too, but, uh. That was mostly my daughter who was responsible for that,” she said. “Her and some of the people we’d taken in, a few of them knew their stuff as well.”

Louisa had studied agriculture in college and kept her head in a crisis like no one else Mariah had ever known. She was probably the only reason any of them had survived at all, though Mariah hadn’t appreciated it too much at the time.

With something like wistfulness he looked around and said:“‘S real pretty.”

She blinked and tried to look at the place through his eyes, as if she hadn’t seen it so often she didn’t remark on it any more than she might her own hand or ankle. The long gentle stretches of scrub brush, interspersed with sharp reddish rocks shading to a faraway blue as they became mountains and mesas in the distance, the sky high and open overhead… “Yeah, I, uh. I suppose it is.”

“I’ve seen a lot of scenery in my time,” Jesse said, cagily. “Only usually I’ve been moving past it at quite some speed. Not a lot of opportunity to, uh, dwell. This is… nicer.”

“…I see,” said Mariah, who really didn’t but could speculate. “Haven’t stayed in one place much, then?”

He shook his head, half opening his mouth as if about to say something and then closing it again. His hair was falling into his eyes under the helmet; she really ought to ask him if he wanted it cut one of these days.

“Well, you’re welcome to look at this,” Mariah waved at the view all around them, “for as long and as close as you’d like. Much like me it’s been here since forever and it ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon.”

He laughed a little. “So… you grew up here?”

“Sure did. Woman, girl and whatever the hell I am these days.” She’d long felt ‘ghost’ might be the appropriate word, but he didn’t need to hear that. “Went away to go to school for a few years at one point, but otherwise — yeah.”

She gave his form another glance and saw that he tended to lift his hands up higher for balance when he got uncertain, his grip ending up too far out on the reins; it was a common enough mistake she’d seen a hundred times before, and easily fixed when you caught it early.

“By the way, you want a tip?”

His eyebrows shot up in surprise and he looked a little wary, but said: “Uh… okay, sure?”

“See here — you don’t need to lift your hands so much, I know it feels like the thing to do but it just messes with your balance. It’s better to keep ‘em lower, somethin’ like this.” She demonstrated. “Pretend you’ve got a little weight in your elbows and keep them close to your sides and that’ll naturally — yeah, there it is, you got it. That’s perfect.”

His frown of concentration gave way to a small satisfied smile and she realized she’d missed teaching — even with the riding school once more opened after the war she hadn’t contributed much to the day to day running of it, mostly sticking to the paperwork and the rest of the stuff that needed doing around the place. There was something about getting to see someone slowly master a skill and guide them along the way that you just didn’t get from anything else, though. Maybe it was time for her to start to take a more active interest again.

Once they got back they lead the horses to the hitching post and Mariah got busy carrying their saddles back to their places in the stable. When she returned Jesse had buried his face against the neck of the horse, petting her flank with slow, contented movements. There was something impossibly sweet about it, the way he had his fingers lightly tangled in the mane, muttering something softly into her coat.

She walked up to him. “You have fun today, kid?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, bright-eyed and bashful. He pressed his cheek against the horse’s neck and she made an amicable sound, chewing on some hay.

“You did good. Think she likes you.”

If she didn’t know any better she’d swear his ears turned faintly pink at the praise. “Well, she’s easy to get along with,” he murmured, stroking her side. Mariah felt an urge to ruffle his hair but supposed he wouldn’t appreciate it. He still seemed nervous about being touched most of the time, and she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.

“Want me to show you how to clean her hooves properly, before we clear out her stall and brush her down?”

“Sure, okay,” he said, lighting up again — he really was interested in this stuff, huh.

“Mrs. Sanchez, where did you _find_ this kid,” Celia laughed, securing her horse a ways over on the hitching post, Christine grinning over her shoulder. “He’s _adorable_!”

Now it wasn’t just his ears turning pink.

“Picked him up at the discount store,” Mariah said, taking pity on him. “Best bargain I ever made. C’mon, kid, let’s go get the equipment we need.”

 

— — — — —

 

After that day Christine and Celia adopted him nearly instantaneously, first as a mascot and eventually as a sort of cross between a cherished little brother and trusted lieutenant once he proved competent. He started to help out with running the less advanced lessons with them, mostly with keeping order and maintaining morale and, occasionally, as an example of how something should be done — he really was an amazingly quick study, and he hadn’t been a _bad_ rider to begin with.

He was good with the younger children, patient, but seemed to stay mostly distant with the ones closer to his own age. Mariah couldn’t tell what side of the equation was doing the distancing and, in time, she decided it might be a bit of both and that it probably didn’t matter; if he’d wanted to hang out with the children his own age more he presumably would have accepted at least one of the invitations to play they extended over the next few months, but he never did, always mumbling something about how there was stuff he needed to do around the farm or some homework he had to finish, maybe next time.

She didn’t want to pressure him into anything he wasn’t ready for, though she supposed she ought to at least have a talk with him about it. Sam had been so happy to have a friend over even when he was getting really sick, and while they were very different kids Mariah figured… it was at least worth bringing the subject up to him at some point.

 

— — —

 

Mariah gave it a month and a half or so of letting him settle in before she tracked the kid down for another kind of necessary conversation.

When she went looking for him he wasn’t in the stables or his room, so she figured the best places to try were either the kitchen or the living room. As she came to the smaller space that opened into the living room her attention snagged on a detail like wool on a branch — something was off about the row of photos on the shelf, some miniscule difference to how it had been yesterday.

Upon inspection there were tracks in the dust on the shelf, almost unnoticeable, as if someone had picked up a few of the picture frames and tried to take some care to put them back in the exact same spot afterwards. She looked at one of those pictures, which turned out to be a family photo. There was a moment spent simply staring at their faces — she hadn’t actually _looked_ at this photo for years, it had simply become an unremarked-upon landmark she had to walk past every day. Sam was seventeen in this, recently grown taller than either of his mothers and caught mid-belly laugh at something Amy had said just before the flash went off. They’d all been so happy he was healthy again, that he’d not only survived two years of illness but was going to suffer no long term problems at all. If she remembered it right Louisa had been back home for the holidays, returning from her first college term with her dark hair cut short like Amy’s and the impatient air of someone who’d sneaked a taste of the world and couldn’t wait to settle in for the feast. The kids were standing in front and blocking it from sight, but Mariah remembered she and Amy had been holding hands.

There were similar tracks by their wedding photo, dust having gathered on the glass and making it seem like they were looking out from behind a thin grey mist. Feeling a pang of mixed guilt and resignation Mariah blew gently on it, clearing the worst of the dust and reluctantly meeting her own eyes in the picture — never a good idea. Even if she hadn’t stood next to Amy, who’d always been a wonderful goddamn beanpole, that suit had done her no favors. She’d bought it in a hurry for her father’s funeral, and it showed. Oh well, at least her hair had always been nice and thick, and still black as night at that point.

Amy was so beautiful, though, like she’d always been, with her freckles and her long nose and the easy good-natured intelligence in her eyes. There was a pink lipstick mark on Mariah's neck that Amy had left there right before they took the picture.

Mariah let herself look for a long time, carefully wiping off the dust still covering Amy’s face with her sleeve.

Amy’s brother had used to joke that the two of them looked like a pair of comedy goons in this picture, one long and lanky and one short and squat, both so young and in ill-fitting suits but grinning at the camera like they’d just won the goddamn lottery, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.

Amy’s brother. The war had taken him too, right at the beginning, only a year or so before… Well.

Mariah put the picture down.

She found Jesse in the next room — he stood reading a book laid open on the sideboard, the Stetson that normally hung on the wall perched comically oversized and slightly askew on his head. Elbows leaned on the top of the sideboard and chin resting in his hands he seemed completely absorbed by the book, stiller than she’d ever seen him. The cat was lying across his feet, snoozing happily.

“Well, howdy there, cowboy,” she said, grinning. Jesse jumped and whirled around to face her, the cat yowling indignantly and running off, and he only kept the hat on at the last second with a hand even as it dipped into his face.

“Oh — I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to — I know I shouldn’t — ” he began, an edge of panic to his voice as he scrambled to take the hat off.

“Relax, kid, you’re not in trouble. Suits you, I’d say. Or it will, when your noggin grows into it. Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Interestin’ book?”

He spluttered for a few seconds, then scratched his head under the hat, his cheeks pink. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”

“Feel free to check out anythin’ that strikes your fancy,” she said, nodding towards the bookcases running along the walls either side of the holoset. “Not like anyone else is reading ‘em. I, uh, probably should tidy up a bit in here too, come to think of it,” she added, eying the stacks of books she hadn’t bothered to put back in the right place and the stratified layers of old musty blankets haphazardly thrown into a pile in an armchair.

He looked around with her, giving her a quick glance. “There really is no one else here?”

“Well, I get some farm hands living in the smaller house over by the stables when I need ‘em, and a few people who come in and run the riding center, like Christine and Celia. That’s mostly how this place stays afloat these days, to be honest.”

“But — living here,” he said hesitantly. “In the house.”

“Just me, last five years or so. And you, I guess, right now,” she added, using a finger to push the hat back on his head to see his face better. He gave a rueful smile but looked confused.

“You said you took some people in during the war, though?”

 _Yeah, but Louisa was too ashamed to let them inside the house to see the state I was in_ , she thought. Out loud she said: “They lived in the small house, some of ‘em, and some in the barn, and some in a couple of camping vans they had. We figured it’d be better to spread out a bit, make ourselves smaller targets. Better chance that _someone_ might make it out alive if they hit us.”

In the old days she might not have been so candid about it to a twelve year old, but he’d grown up during the worst of it. It seemed insulting to pretend he didn’t understand.

“I guess we were lucky, in the end, the omnics never did make the trip all the way out here,” she added, sounding bitter to her own ears. Amy and Sam hadn’t been on the farm when it happened. They’d been out looking for Amy’s little sister and her children, trying to find out if they were still alive. From what little Mariah remembered of that day she knew she’d had a bad feeling, that she would have gone with them if Louisa hadn’t been so sick with a bad fever that they hadn’t dared to leave her alone. That she’d asked, _begged_ , Amy to wait, just a few days, so they could go together and avoid the risk of getting cut off from each other.

Well. In Amy’s defense she had been right. If they had waited it probably would have been too late. Her sister survived.

The cat deigned to return from the other room, scowling even as it wound between Jesse’s legs demanding petting.

“Sorry ‘bout that one, friend, didn’t mean to scare you,” Jesse told it, appropriately contrite, crouching down and picking it up to hold it against his chest. It purred in triumph, giving Mariah a dark look as if to say it _knew_ its previous indignity had been all her fault somehow. Mariah could swear that cat had the devil in it, but it had always been sweet as a lamb with Louisa and seemed to take to Jesse in a similar way.

Jesse murmured something low and cooing into its fur and the cat smugly looked away from her and closed its eyes, purring even louder.

She smiled despite herself. Okay, this was as good a time to break it to him as any.

“Hey kid,” she said, drumming her fingers against the back of the couch, “you’ve been to school before, right?”

“...sure, a bit?” he said, tipping his head to the side to look at her, as if the question confused him, putting the cat carefully down on the couch and brushing some white fur off his t-shirt. “Enough?”

She blew out a breath. Well, of course, he’d have to have been, what… around four when the war started? Whatever education he’d managed to stumble upon was unlikely to have been too consistent or involved. “What would you say to havin’ a bit more, even so?”

He tipped his head to the other side as if he were a bewildered bird, like a sweet scruffy crow trying to work out a puzzle. “Uh… dunno, I guess. Why, what are you gonna do, fake some papers and send me to school in town? ‘Cause I’ll be honest, I’m not wild about that idea.”

She gathered up some books that had been lying in a disorganized pile in a corner for… probably close to two years at this point. “Oh, nothin’ so dramatic. I homeschooled our youngest for a while, after he got sick for a few years. He was about the same age as you at the time. I got the hang of it eventually, and I still got all the resources from back then. Better than nothin’, or so I thought. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

He made a skeptical face.

“Careful, partner, or your face’ll stick like that,” she said, bopping his nose with her finger on her way past to the bookcase.

After briefly going cross-eyed to follow her finger he laughed, scrunching up his nose. “Yeah, right.”

“Doesn’t have to be anything too big or involved,” she said. “Couple of hours here and there, just to make sure you’re not gonna end up half illiterate and counting on your fingers when you’re a grown man.”

“I _know_ how to _read,_ ” he protested, sounding so earnestly offended she had to bite down on a smile.

“Well then, we’re halfway there already,” she said blithely, sliding the books into place wherever there was room; she’d organize it all properly later. “Don’t know what you’re fretting about.”

“Know how to count, too,” he murmured peevishly, but it was clearly a half-hearted rebellion at this point. He bit his lip thoughtfully. “Okay. Okay, _maybe_ I’ll agree to that, if…”

He blanched, as if horrified with himself for… for what? For arguing? If he considered that to be any kind of talking back, he should’ve seen the shit Louisa pulled when she was twelve. He looked queasy, though, and his sentence stayed stuttered to a halt.

Mariah had the distinct feeling that if she’d been a younger woman there were at least a couple of adults out there she’d have to track down and introduce to the wrong end of a baseball bat. Maybe that wasn’t the most productive instinct right now, though. She didn’t have names or addresses, but she did have a kid looking uncharacteristically timid in the middle of her living room.

“Okay then, let’s hear it,” she said easily. “I got my negotiation glasses on, I’m ready.”

He swallowed, not meeting her eyes.

She touched his arm. “Jesse, I wouldn’t have asked what you thought about it if I didn’t want to hear it, okay? This is somethin’ about _your_ life; you’ve got the right to an opinion more than anyone.”

“If I say yes, can we talk about what’s in some of these too?” he asked eventually, pointing at the book he’d been reading. “Only it’s pretty interestin’, but I don’t understand all of it.”

She blinked, then reached out and flipped the book over. It was one of her old history textbooks from college. “Sure,” she said after a while. “Sure, we can do that. I might want to find us somethin’ a bit more up to date, though, these are gettin’ pretty old.”

“Ancient history,” he offered, finally looking at her properly. “Literally.”

With a chuckle she gave him the book back. “Not too bad, kid, not too bad. We have a deal, then? At least to give it a try?”

She held out her hand, lifting an eyebrow. He eyed it dubiously for a while, but then something shifted in his body language, his head tilting to the side and a little shrug moving like a wave through his shoulders.

“Sure,” he said, taking her hand. “Why the hell — heck not, ma’am.”

 

— — — — —

 

They settled into a rhythm of sorts: in the evenings there was the riding center, and during the day, when it was too hot out to comfortably get much work done on the farm anyway, there was Jesse’s schoolwork.

That, too, went surprisingly smoothly. She’d known the kid was smart, but she found herself unprepared for the speed at which they burned through the syllabus, having to scramble to stay ahead and prepared each week. For all he’d dragged his feet about it he often seemed to end up enjoying the schoolwork despite himself, like giving that restless brain of his something to focus on anchored him a bit, let him breathe more. There were necessarily large holes in some of his fundamental background knowledge, but they filled in slowly but surely as they trudged through the material, going back to the basics as needed.

The only subject he truly seemed to struggle with was the more abstract areas of math. Well, struggled was maybe the wrong word for it — it was not so much that he wasn’t bright enough to get it, god knew, it was more that his attention span seemed to melt into nothingness, like a soft serve ice cream under the merciless desert sun at noon, the moment his eyes registered a problem he couldn’t just solve in his head within five seconds.

He’d mostly stick with it if she sat there and guided him back when his attention started to drift, but left to his own devices he was far more likely to start drawing little cowboy cartoons in the margins. Once when she was looking over his answers she found he’d submitted something along the lines of _‘who cares’_ , _‘maybe Sarah should buy a gun or just get better friends who don’t steal_ any _of her apples’_ and _‘but the train got held up by armed robbers and tragically never made it to the point where the trains were supposed to meet at all, very sad, question invalid’_ to every problem on the page. When she’d finished laughing her ass off — as quietly as she could, because the last thing he needed was encouragement — she had him do it again, though she felt obliged to commend the creative approach too.

“Bullshitting is a valuable life skill, kid, but it won’t get you _everywhere,_ ” she consoled him, as he let his head fall back on a groan. “Gotta know enough numbers to tell if someone’s tryin’ to cheat you as well.”

“Well, I’m sure calculatin’ the exact moment in time two trains pass each other will be super useful in real life, for when I’m jumping from the roof of one high speed train to another,” he said, the sarcasm so scathing her eyebrows should by all rights be singed clean off. “Gonna be a real boon to my highwayman career.”

“When I start seeing the wanted posters I’ll know it weren’t all for nothing,” she said dryly. “C’mon, I’ll help you.”

When there weren’t horses or school to occupy him he mostly seemed content to watch movies or read by himself, and he dedicated himself to both with a voracious appetite that never seemed to slow down.

It was strange, watching him — there was a _hunger_ there she didn’t remember in her own children, a way he disappeared completely into the stories and could be retrieved from them only with care and time. When they were small Sam and Louisa would be entranced by the TV or the holoset, like any kid, but when she or Amy called for them they’d easily come out of it and answer. Jesse… Jesse got this look in his eyes, as if he were somewhere far away and could barely hear you, his gaze fixed on you but seeming to see something else, and it always took him that painfully long moment to return to himself.

The first few times it had scared her a little — it was a hell of a thing, seeing a child get _lost_ like that, right in front of you but out of your reach — but with time she learned to just wait for him to come back. And he always _did_ come back, in the end, blinking back into the real world like someone startled by a bright light.

It was like nothing she had seen before, but by all accounts it worked for him — often it appeared to be the only thing that could really calm him down, especially in the evenings before going to bed. His tastes swung wildly between highly eclectic and fastidiously specific: with movies he stuck almost exclusively to Westerns, regardless of quality, merit or how many times he’d seen the damn film before — Mariah was pretty sure _she_ could quote every line of dialogue in ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, at this point — but when it came to reading he’d simply devour anything he could get his hands on. Mythology, fiction, more of Mariah’s old abandoned college textbooks; if it fell into his path he snapped it up and crashed through it headlong. Quite quickly he exhausted her little collection and she managed to install a public library app of some kind on his holovid to give him access to more.

She grew used to hearing him chuckling in the background and making comments to himself over the books as she moved around the house, finding him slouched on the sofa with the cat sleeping on his chest. The lines of him grew softer over time, covering over most of the sharp hungry edges, making him look even more like the kid he was.

The world kept turning.

Whenever she turned on the holoset she saw the energy of relief, the joy that the end of the world had come and gone and yet here we were, having suffered yet crucially _endured_ — the commitment to rebuild and restore, to make something _better_ this time. The Overwatch logo seemed to be plastered over every damn surface you could point a camera at. She’d heard that blond white boy in the blue coat talk often enough that she sometimes half thought he was one of Amy’s various and sundry cousins, that she’d been listening to his voice half her goddamn life.

None of it seemed to have anything to do with her. Nothing of what she had lost could be rebuilt, and her only relief was that at least there was less to lose now. Sam and Amy had been taken by the war, and Louisa had been lost to Mariah’s own negligence and stupidity.

(She’d taken better care of the horses than her daughter during those years. She knew that. There was nothing she could do about it now — she’d gone on the wagon and she’d tried to assemble herself into _something_ like a person again, but it wasn’t like that was any cause to try to roll out a ratty old welcome mat and ask someone to give you another chance. There had been chances, and she’d squandered them all. That was that.)

Mostly when she turned the thing on these days it was to let Jesse watch one of his cowboy movies. Other than that she was happy for it to gather dust.

She started letting him go on longer riding trips on his own when he asked, provided he took his phone with him and wore a helmet — “Awww, _c’mon,_ ma’am,” he whined, already firmly planted in the saddle; “C’mon is right, put it on,” she answered, tossing him the helmet — and he came back sunburned and grinning and full of questions about a new type of bird he’d seen or a rock formation nearby or where the best place to cross the little river to the south-west was. He made small braids in Sonya’s mane and beamed like a ray of sunlight whenever she nuzzled affectionately at him as he groomed her. He grew to know the land like you only do when you are very young and one place can be your entire world, every rock and branch and animal hideout recognized and accounted for, every bush an obvious bombastic landmark, in that same unthinkingly intimate way she’d once had and lost somewhere along the way. She’d lived in this place for almost sixty years now, but when she was ten she had _known_ it, like he did now. Like her children once had before him.

 

— — —

 

When she came back from the grocery store Jesse sat at the kitchen table with his nose in a book — something with dragons and werewolves and fantasy ninjas, from the cover, Mariah though it might be from a series Sam had read obsessively when he was sixteen.

“Hey there, partner,” she said, hip checking the door a bit more open to make it easier to get through with the grocery bags.

She put the bags down on the kitchen counter. Jesse looked up from his book and half got to his feet as he said: “Hey. You need any help with those?”

“Nope, I got it, don’t worry,” she said. As she unpacked and put everything away she became aware that he hadn’t returned to reading but was watching her, looking like he wanted to say something but felt queasy at the prospect. Giving him some time she worked with calm methodical movements, tidying up a bit as well as she went, putting some plates away in the dishwasher.

Finally she rinsed off the tomatoes and put them in a bowl, then dried her hands on the kitchen towel. There, that should be all of it.

“Uh… ma’am,” he said, courage apparently mustered. “Theoretically.”

Oh dear. “Uh-huh,” she nodded slowly, hanging the kitchen towel back on its hook.

“ _Theoretically._ If I’d done something kinda bad.” He paused, biting his lip, then made a face. “Really bad. Not, not here,” he added hurriedly, glancing up at her. “Before here. But it was pretty bad.”

“Uh-huh?”

He squirmed on the chair like there was an ant colony migrating over the seat, fiddled with the drawstrings of his hoodie. “Would you — would you be… mad at me?”

She looked at him for a long time, then went over to him and reached out to touch his shoulder, leaning down to press a quick kiss to his wild brown hair because he’d sounded so _young_ — and of course he was, but it sometimes faded into the background between how smart he was and the outlook of jaded world-weariness he’d already managed to accumulate.

“Jesse,” she said. “You’re twelve years old. Ain’t a thing in the world you could’ve done that I won’t forgive you for.”

His shoulders dropped in relief, just a little.

“...pretty sure I’m really thirteen now,” he offered finally, leaning the tiniest bit into her touch.

She snorted. “Oh well, throw out every word I just said, then, that changes everything.”

His laugh was weak and stuttering, but real.

“You wanna talk about it?”

He shook his head so sharply he must be dizzy afterwards. “No.”

Not yet, then. “That’s fine. Just one thing, though — should I expect someone knocking on the door someday, askin’ questions?”

“Um…” He stared into thin air for a while, as if considering, which was not the reaction she had been distantly hoping for in spite of her cynical disposition.

“The police, maybe?” she hazarded, studying his face carefully.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, and seemed to mean it. “No, probably not the cops. Probably… probably not anyone, actually. It was pretty far away and they’d have no way to know it was me or where I….”

They looked at each other for a long time.

“No,” he said finally, shaking his head.

She squeezed his shoulder. “Well, then,” she said. “We never need to say anythin’ more about it unless you want to.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Ain’t none of my business unless you want it to be.”

He nodded and looked relieved, but also… something else. There was still a current of a dissatisfied unease there, an unsettled thing he was trying to hide.

Hm. Pushing him further seemed unlikely to yield any results, and would belie what she’d just promised besides. She rummaged around in her head for something else to offer that would help settle him.

“You wanna sit down and watch a movie with me, before we make dinner? Think I’ve got some popcorn tucked away in a cupboard somewhere too. Your choice of vid,” she added, though she realized that could very easily mean having to watch ‘For a Fistful of Dollars More’ or ‘Tombstone’ yet _again_. He’d had a ‘Tombstone’ period lately; there seemed to be something about Doc Holliday, gambling and bullshitting eloquently while dying tragically of consumption, that transfixed him. She didn’t have the heart to take that away from him, even if she did occasionally nod off during the straight romance scenes.

“...yeah, okay,” he said, a bashful smile playing at the corner of his mouth as he put whatever that uneasiness had been away and got up.

They ended up watching ‘The Magnificent Seven’, which she’d thankfully only seen four times at this point.

 

— — — — —

 

Five months later Sonya broke her leg and had to be put down that same day.

 

— — — — —

 

Thankfully Jesse wasn’t there right when the accident happened, and no one was riding her at the time, but that was about all the blessings to count here. In the end no one seemed entirely sure how it had happened — maybe there had been something on the ground that scared her and she’d stepped wrong, maybe there was already an existing weakness in her leg that had developed without anyone managing to pick up on it, maybe she’d stumbled over an unexpected hole or rock in precisely the wrong way.

It was just plain old bad luck, any way you cut it.

The horse made frantic, pained noises, tilting to one side as she tried to avoid bearing her weight on the injured leg, and Mariah hissed through her teeth and told Christine to call the vet, talking low soothing nonsense and doing her best to calm the animal and stop her from exacerbating the injury.

“What’s wrong, what happened?” Jesse asked, running up and hovering close by.

“Uh, stay back a moment, Jesse,” Mariah said, holding up a warning hand. “She’s hurtin’, might be a bit unpredictable. Not quite in her right mind.”

Taking half a step forward he stopped himself, hands curled into fists at his sides. “But what’s wrong with her?”

“Not quite sure — somethin’ happened with her leg while they were taking her in from pasture.”

“The vet can fix it, though, right?”

He stared at her with round, scared eyes, and she gave him the most reassuring smile she could muster before turning her attention back to the struggling horse. “Let’s hope so. We’ll see.”

And goddamn him, he’d always been too smart for his own good: he saw right through her at once, his face falling in the split second before he turned away.

It was obvious to her from the start what would have to happen. Not a lot of horses survived a broken leg, and this break looked ugly. She’d seen it enough times before — thankfully not with her own horses, but you couldn’t be in the business for many years without experiencing it at least second hand. It was always sad, of course, but giving them an easy, painless escape from the hurt and confusion was a necessary part of ownership, and kinder besides. Some days it seemed somewhat of a marvel to her that any horse lived to see the double digits, considering the myriad of things that could potentially go wrong with them, even with the most tender care and under the best conditions. Perhaps it was one of the reasons she liked them so much; they were always beating the odds, considering some damp hay could easily be the end of them. At forty five, old Donny was nothing short of a cantankerous, drowsy, mildly malodorous miracle.

They managed to get Sonya the short way to her stall without making anything worse and settled her down, Christine staying and keeping an eye on her the whole time as Mariah made preparations for when the vet arrived.

While they waited Jesse moved around the place like a restless shadow, turning up at the edge of Mariah’s perception for a moment and then disappearing again before she could have a word with him. She’d wanted to take him aside, explain the situation, make sure he was prepared for what was in all likelihood about to happen, but he kept slipping away. It gave her a heavy sensation in her gut, a bad feeling that wouldn’t ease.

It was only when the vet turned up and had given his sad inevitable verdict, after he’d emptied the syringe and Sonya’s body lay slumped lifelessly on the ground, that Jesse turned up again, his expression a complete blank, wordlessly sitting down on the straw next to her and reaching out to slowly pet her neck, calm and firm just the way she’d liked. He ran his fingers through her mane, untangling the loose little braids he’d tended to make there during idle moments. Mariah didn’t say anything and the vet — good old Dr. Harris, who’d seen more than a thing or two in his time and knew people almost as well as he did parasitic infections in cattle — patted her shoulder and started tidying up his equipment in the background, giving the boy some space.

“Thank you, Doc,” she said quietly.

Dr. Harris smiled and cleaned his wire rim glasses; he’d carried an air of melancholy with him for all of the thirty years she’d known him, even long before he lost his son in the Crisis. It had always seemed unfair to her, that someone so kind should have to be so sad. Amy had liked him a lot, even if she never did stop finding it deeply upsetting when they had to put down an animal.

Louisa had always taken it worst, though. Whenever it had to happen it had ruined her entire month and she’d been sullen and turned in on herself the entire time until it faded again. Surprisingly it’d been Sam — sweet, soft puppyish Sam, who cried at children’s movies well into his twenties — who’d best understood the process and the necessity, had been calm and gentle and reassuring with the animals all the way until it was over.

“There’s no hurry,” Dr. Harris said, running his fingers through what little remained of his hair. “We’ll have a talk about what to do with the remains tomorrow, huh?”

Jesse sat there on the floor with one hand on Sonya’s flank as her body cooled, and then he got up and went off somewhere for the rest of the evening. No one had any idea where he’d gone. She found his phone left on the kitchen table and one of the farm’s various rusting bikes gone.

Christine and Celia, uncharacteristically somber-faced and subdued, offered to go out and have a look for him before they headed home and Mariah told them no, it’d be fine. She doubted he’d appreciate being hunted down like some lost lamb and really, if he truly meant not to be found there was precious little anyone could do about it. He knew the land around here better than anyone, at this point.

The girls went home and Mariah went inside, standing in the hallway for a while and listening to the silence of the house. She washed her hands, did some paperwork she’d been meaning to get to, heated leftovers in the microwave for dinner.

Sitting in her kitchen until the light faded outside and she was left in darkness, she waited.

Finally, at half past one, she thought she heard something outside, like a bike being leaned up against a wall with only enough care not to break it.

She found him in the stables, in one of the smaller rooms where they kept a few backup hay bales and various equipment they didn’t need to use on an everyday basis, but still wanted to have easily at hand. The ceiling lamp was turned on in there, the bare light bulb sending tired yellowed light through the half-open door to puddle over the ground outside. He sat on the floor, leaned back against the wall and curled up on himself in an angry little ball, hunched up inside his hoodie like he was cold.

He was smoking a cigarette, grimly, more like a steely-eyed grizzled veteran taking a quick break in the trenches than a thirteen year old who’d presumably snuck the smokes out of her coat pocket while her back was turned one day. At a different time she might have found the image obliquely amusing.

Maybe it was just as well there was no drop of alcohol anywhere on the farm.

She ducked inside, leaned against the doorframe, arms folded over her chest. “Hey there, partner.”

With a short grunt of acknowledgement he took another pull on the cigarette.

“Now, where’d you get that?” she asked, nodding at it.

“Around,” he said.

“And if I were to ask you where you’ve been…”

He gave a brief joyless smile and confirmed: “Around.”

“I see.”

She cumbersomely sat down next to him on the stone floor, ignoring her old bones groaning and her bad knee giving an indignant stab of pain. He steadfastly refused to look at her; she took some time to settle before offering: “Y’know, I was worried about you.”

He shrugged tightly, bracing his leg against a hay bale, the plastic film giving a squeak as the sole of his shoe slid over it.

“This about Sonya?”

No answer.

“It ain’t your fault, Jesse. She just got sick. It happens sometimes, horses can be pretty damn fragile in some ways. Nothin’ anyone could’ve done.”

He bit his lip briefly, skin whitening as the teeth dug in, then just kept right on smoking, gaze not deviating from where he was watching the night sky through the crack in the stable door. She went to put her hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” he snapped, flinching away from her, half on his feet in an instant.

She nodded, letting her hands fall back into her lap. “Okay.”

It didn’t seem to be the wrong thing to do, but not quite the right thing either; for a second he looked even angrier. He sat back down, shoulders drawn up nearly to his ears. They sat in a silence only broken by the sounds of him moving as he finished his cigarette and tersely ground it out against a spot of bare stone. He folded his arms over his chest.

“So — you gonna say something, or…” he said finally, glancing over at her.

“Huh?”

“I… aren’t you mad?” he asked, staring at her almost entreatingly, his body language losing some of the stony rebellious energy to give way to something vulnerable and scared and small.

She folded her hands in her lap. “What for?”

He gestured jerkily. “For… for runnin’ off and for stealing your cigarettes and for being — ” He broke off, his mouth pulling down on one side.

 _Where was this calm back when Louisa was a teenager?_ she thought ruefully to herself. That girl had known how to wind her up like no one else, and Mariah always, _always_ let herself get riled up in the end, noble intentions and honest promises to Amy be damned. Maybe… maybe if she had learned how to handle that better back then it would have turned out differently later. Or maybe that was mostly the drink getting between them at that point. Oh well, too late to change any of that now. At least she could still try to be something like fair to this kid.

“I’m not mad at you,” she told him. “I was worried and I wish you’d told me where you were going, or at least brought your phone with you, in case something happened out there. But I’m not mad.”

He looked at her for a second with a flat, expressionless set to his face, still tense as a bowstring all over. “But what if… what if I fucked up because there was somethin’ wrong with her leg for a _while_ and… and I didn’t notice it and I could’ve done something if I’d just been more — ”

“First off, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anythin’ wrong, she just got real unlucky. Happens sometimes, and it’s no one’s fault, really. Seen a couple of cases of it before in my time. Secondly — Jesse, that ain’t your responsibility. I’ve been around horses all my life; if there’s anyone who should’ve noticed anything, it’d be me. None of this is your fault.”

That one seemed to hit something; he flinched like he’d been shot, his breath catching.

She shifted on the hard stone floor to get her bad knee into a more comfortable position and watched the stars through the crack in the stable door, thinking.

Eventually she said: “It’s fine to be sad about it, you know. Sonya was a good, sweet horse; you spent a lot of time together. She was important to you. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with mourning that she’s gone.”

Then, finally and very slowly, his expression cracked open, and she felt her tattered ramshackle heart give a chime as his eyes grew wide and shiny and defenseless.

He quietly let his head tip to the side until his forehead rested on her shoulder, thin shoulders shaking.

“Hey there, cowboy,” she whispered, gathering him in until he was safely pressed against her, holding him close as he all but curled up in her lap — he fisted his hands in her sweater and she cradled his messy-haired head against her, letting her thumb brush back and forth over the nape of his neck, mumbling soothing nonsense while he sobbed into her shoulder.

He cried like the world was ending, like it already had, long ago, and no one had had the fucking decency to notice. He cried like this was about a lot more than a horse, than any one thing. She rested her cheek against the top of his head, arms wrapped around him like that could really protect him from anything that mattered.

“‘S okay,” she mumbled, rocking him. “It’s okay to cry. Just let it out.”

The sobbing continued, and something in her recognized the edge to it — it was the sound of a much younger child crying, the bottomless despair of not yet knowing that pain can fade and hurts can be soothed. She wondered distantly how long ago his mother had died. Surely that must’ve been what had happened; she couldn’t imagine how anyone could have had the heart to leave him, wouldn’t have done _anything_ to find him again as long as she still lived.

She kissed his hair. “Oh baby boy, sssshh, it’s gonna be alright. I know it doesn’t feel that way right now, but you’re gonna be okay.”

In the end she had no idea how long it lasted, only that when the sobs faded into hitching breaths and then into quiet she held him a little while longer, stroking his hair.

When he finally moved he sat back and blinked against the low lights, looking faintly confused and red-eyed. For a long time he just stared at her in perfect silence, and then he seemed to startle into motion again, drawing in a shaky breath.

“Sorry,” he stammered, drying his eyes hurriedly with his sleeve, “shit, I’m sorry, that was dumb, I shouldn’t’ve — ”

“Ain’t nothing to be sorry about, Jesse. You’ve done nothin’ wrong.” With all the care she knew how to put into it she reached out to ruffle his hair. He blinked in surprise but didn’t move away, only answered with a hesitant, wet little smile of his own. His hair stood up on one side; she gently patted it back down before letting her hand fall away.

As he didn’t say anything more or make to move she pulled out the lighter and a packet of smokes, crossing her legs at the ankles with some difficulty and a wince. He watched her roll a cigarette, a calculating look on his face. Perhaps judging that her sympathies were recently roused enough that it was worth a try he started: “Just this once, can I — ”

“No chance in hell,” she said calmly, lighting up. “I can kill myself slowly with these things ‘cause I’m an adult, you’ll have to wait your turn until you’ve got that privilege as well.”

With an easygoing shrug and tilt of his head he said: “Well. Can’t blame a man for giving it a shot.”

She snorted and nodded her concession to this; the jaunty expression sat strange but familiar on his still tear-streaked face. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I hear you. I stopped for a long time, y’know,” she added. “For more than a decade, before I was dumb enough to start up again.”

Because Amy had asked her to stop, after she’d grown worried about the coughing in the mornings and god help her, Mariah had never been able to withstand Amy’s puppy dog expression for more than five minutes before cracking. She’d only started again after she stopped drinking, when it had seemed the lesser of two evils anyway. Quitting them back then had been easier than she thought it would be, but then… it hadn’t lasted, so maybe it hadn’t been, in the end.

They sat in silence for a long while. The air seemed heavy, like her skin was too old and tired to bear the weight of it anymore.

“Can I ask you somethin’?” he said abruptly. “About, uh. About your family?”

Blinking slowly she brought the cigarette to her mouth. He’d never asked her about anything like that before, had seemed to move deliberately around the subject like it was a sore tooth he didn’t want to disturb. “Sure, if you want. Shoot.”

“Was your wife like… an astronomer or somethin’?” he asked, glancing at her quickly through the spiraling ribbons of smoke. “Only there’re loads of old books about stars and space and shit in the living room.”

She chuckled, taking another pull on the cigarette. _‘Stars and space and shit’._ “Yeah. Astrophysicist. We met in college, but I never — I had to drop out when my old man got sick, never finished. She followed me out here after she was done with her degree and married me, for some inexplicable reasons of her own.”

“What’d you study? History?”

She nodded, savoring a lungful of smoke and letting it linger there before releasing it. “Dunno what I meant to achieve with it, but yeah. Guess I always wanted to know how we got here. The world, I mean. People. In general.”

“You ever figure it out?”

“If I do, you’ll be the first to know, partner,” she said, and he grinned his quick bright grin. “That was almost a lifetime ago now, though. Don’t remember that much of it, to be honest with you. Hm. But did you know that the stars we can see right now are really just what they looked like in the past? ‘Cause it takes so long for the light to reach us, y’know. Some of ‘em are billions of lightyears away. Might even be dead and gone, and we won’t know it for thousands and thousands of years.”

He rested his chin in his palm, staring at the night sky through the open door. “Guess I sorta knew that. Hadn’t thought about it quite like that, though.”

“I’d say to her — to Amy, my wife… ‘So you’re tryin’ to understand stars from a million years ago? Doesn’t that make you a historian of light?’ She liked that. Said she wanted to put it on her resume. I — ”

_Meant to put it on her headstone, but I was too drunk and too dead inside to do anything about it. So it just says the normal platitudes, devoted mother, beloved wife, like she was any other person. I failed her even after she was gone._

But he was just a boy. He shouldn’t have to know something like that. “Well. Made her laugh, anyway.”

“Sometimes that’s good enough, right?” he said after a while, watching her with wide, unusually guileless eyes, the evidence of the tears starting to dry away.

Her head filled with it, so many nights with Amy’s grin turned towards her, so many mornings coaxing Sam and Louisa out of bed and following their laughter as she made hand puppets with the towels and pretended to chase them. The silence in the house after it happened, the two year drunken stupor that left her memories of that time mangled and full of holes like a tapestry shredded by knives. The war had raged on, and she’d barely known it. The war had ended, and she barely noticed. None of that had stuck. Only Louisa’s furious disappointment and hurt eyes. Only the door slamming behind her, that last night when she packed her bags, and Mariah’s last unforgivable betrayal of her as she couldn’t even find it in her to care that her only daughter — her only child, then — was leaving for good. Only the absences left in her world, rendering her a negative space drawing of what she once had been.

_He’s just a boy._

“Yeah, Jesse,” she said, because she had grown to love him, like the damn fool she was. No one ever learns from history. “Sometimes it is.”

 

— — — — —

 

He seemed different after that day. There was no seismic shift, of course — there seldom is, in real people. Too many interlocking parts for that, too much history that needs a change of direction and momentum, and he seemed to have picked up a lot of past in the relatively few years he’d had to do it in. But he seemed calmer now, like something of the restlessness eased its hold on him and let him breathe freer. He stopped sending her that look he’d had when he forgot himself, like he was waiting for her to snap and shout at him. He started appearing at her side during quiet moments, standing close enough that she would put a hand on his shoulder and let him turn into the touch; it was not entirely unlike the cat sidling up to her for a few minutes of petting before taking off again.

The nightmares she’d occasionally had to gently shake him awake from when she heard the whimpers from his room became fewer and farther between and eventually disappeared completely.

One day he came home with a poster he’d bought in town — more or less the sort of jubilant clichéd cowboy iconography you’d expect, the Man With No Name But With a Thousand Faces riding off into a sunset, though it was, in her admittedly inexpert opinion, a stylish and artistically competent rendition of him. She helped Jesse hang it in his room, over the bed. He looked so tremendously satisfied, hands resting on his hips as he surveyed the result, that she had to grin at his back, her chest aching.

Everything was peaceful for a spell, until that day Jesse landed himself in trouble fist first.

 

— — —

 

She was sitting in the kitchen when the doorbell rang — she’d almost forgotten what sound it made at this point; Christine and Celia would just knock on the doorframe on their way in.

“...please come in?” Mariah ventured, newspaper hovering over her lap. “It’s open.”

Someone ducked in through the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the frame.

“Hey, Mrs. Sanchez. Hope the day’s been treating you well so far.”

He was a tall lean middle aged man, a deceptively youthful and jovial look about him despite the wrinkles that she thought she recognized from somewhere else. “Kurt, right? Celia’s dad.”

“That’s me. Sorry to barge in on you like this bringing only trouble, but, uh — your kid. He’s been fighting one of the other boys in town. Broke the other boy’s nose, or so I heard tell.”

She stared at him. “My — _Jesse_?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I — but he was right here just an hour ago!” she said, momentarily too stunned for logic to gain a foothold in her mind.

He shrugged. “Well, half an hour ago he was busy enthusiastically rearranging the Summers boy’s face, so I guess he must’ve managed to get into town by that point.”

“Is he okay?”

Kurt gave a crooked grin and shrugged. “Benny Summers? Well, he seemed well enough to inform everyone non-stop how he was gonna go tell his dad about this, so I suspect he’ll live.”

Mariah, who had very much not meant Benny Summers but supposed that was good too, said: “And uh, my boy, where…”

Gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder Kurt said: “I guessed you might wanna have a talk with him, so I drove him here. Should be right outside, unless he’s run off hoping for a stay of execution. You’ll have to pick up his bike in town later, sorry, couldn’t fit it in the car.”

“Oh, please, don’t worry about it. Thank you so much for uh. For getting’ him back here in one piece, I appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, holding his hands up. “My daughter would have my head if I didn’t, she seems to have a soft spot of the boy. And I’ve raised a couple of kids that age too, I know how it can be. Want me to send him in when I go?”

“Yeah, please. And thank you again.”

He gave a cheerful wave as he turned and went back outside.

“Good luck in there, buddy,” she heard Kurt say through the open window, then the crunch of footsteps on gravel as he walked towards his car. Jesse murmured something back, but too low for her to make it out.

Then Jesse came stumbling in, sporting a defiant expression, a split lip and blood drying around his nostrils in a way that suggested a nosebleed that had only recently stopped — though not nearly enough of it to account for the amount of blood on his t-shirt.

“Holy sh — snap, kid,” Mariah said, getting to her feet and moving over to where he had stopped sullenly in the middle of the floor upon seeing her. She put a hand on his shoulder, looking him over. “You okay?”

Jesse snorted contemptuously. “‘Course I am, Benny Summers hits like a bab — ”

“I want you to think very carefully about what you’re about to say, young man.”

Clearly still seething internally but reining himself in he mumbled: “Yeah, sure, I’m fine.”

There was the sound of a car starting up and pulling away. She got a clean handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it gently against his lip, patting away the worst of the blood. “The hell happened, Jesse?”

“He _started it_ ,” Jesse snarled, hands curled into fists at his sides, knuckles scraped and raw. “I’ve never said two words to that asshole unprompted and I don’t care to start now, but he _keeps_ tracking me down and — ”

“I don’t give a shit who started it!” she said, glaring at him as she carefully guided his hand to take the handkerchief and keep it in place. “That ain’t what I asked you.”

Jesse threw his arms up, bloody handkerchief trailing, and all but stomped his foot, the image of the wounded unfairly accused. “He’s always pickin’ on me, trying to start a fight and talking shit and I — ”

“Since when is anything that comes out of that fool boy’s snotty mouth worth gettin’ into trouble for? Listen, if he’s picking on you, you come to me and I’ll have good long talk with his parents about it, but you can’t just go around throwing punches and expect that to accomplish anything.”

He stood up to his full height — which was not so unimpressive anymore, she suddenly noticed, he’d grown like a dandelion the last few months, his pants getting too short in the legs; she’d have to take him into town to get a few new pairs — and practically glowed with righteous fury. “But it’s _unfair_ that _I’m_ the one who gets in trouble when he’s the one who keeps — ”

She waved this away dismissively. “Ain’t no fair or unfair about it, Jesse, you’re way too smart to solve your problems with your fists and you _know_ it.” After a few surprised blinks at that the mutinous scowl returned to his face. “Are there more of them, or just him?”

“It’s just him, don’t think anyone else can stand him enough to join in. But he said — ”

“I don’t care what Benny Summers said,” she snapped. “Benny Summers does not live under my roof! Benny Summers is not my — ”

Silence fell between them, deep and hungry, his eyes wide as he stared at her.

She took a breath, stroked his unruly hair out of his eyes. “I don’t care about Benny Summers. I care about _you._ ” His face did something that made her heart clench. “And this ain’t like you, Jesse.”

He looked away at that. “What if…”

His voice was so small she couldn’t pick up what he was saying. “What was that, partner?”

“What if it _is_ like me?” Jesse said quietly, glancing up at her. “What if… what if I knew how to throw a punch because I’ve done it before? Lots? Before…”

Trailing off he just stood stock still on the floor, his narrow chest moving with quick, tight breathing.

After a while she combed some blood out of his hair with careful fingers, pushing it away from his forehead. “Remember what I said that time? About anything bad that had happened, that you’d done?”

He swallowed. “...yeah.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” she said, stroking his cheek with her thumb. “You can always tell me about it, if you want to. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Wasn’t your fault. You were a kid. And I don’t want to watch you throw away any part of your future over idiots like Benny Summers, ‘cause if he starts makin’ noise about it… we’re not the kinda people the cops _or_ the town are gonna side with. You see?”

A look of understanding came over his face and he bit his lip. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Not saying Benny Summers couldn’t do with a good fist to the face to show him the error of his bullying ways, but he ain’t worth it.”

Jesse glanced down at his hands and wiped some of the dust and blood off them onto his t-shirt, still clutching the handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“Hey,” she said, opening her arms awkwardly. “C’mere?”

He wriggled on the spot for a split second as if unsure what to do, but then he scurried forward and accepted the hug, burrowing his face into her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him and let them both pretend she didn’t hear the sniffle being muffled into her sweater.

“Benny said some… some stupid stuff about you. And that we’d have to sell the horses soon,” Jesse said eventually. “That we’re too poor to afford to keep ‘em.”

“Of course he did,” she mumbled. “Well, his daddy always was an ignorant elitist cu — guy, maybe it ain’t so strange if he’s picking up some of it already.”

“Is it true?”

“That Custer Summers is a real piece of shit and always has been? Sure, you can quote me on that one.”

He snorted. “I — I meant about the money stuff.”

She pulled away a bit to look at him. “Even if it were — and it ain’t — it still wouldn’t be your job to worry about it. Okay? It’ll be alright. Money’s tight sometimes, sure, but money’s always been tight, even back when my father owned this place, and we’re still here going strong anyway, right? ”

 _What’s left of us_ , some distant part of her head observed, _what’s left of me,_ but she focused on Jesse and his earnest worried face.

His expression became thoughtful in that way that, while deeply endearing, rarely promised anything good. ‘So sharp you might just cut yourself’ was an expression that seemed to have been specifically invented in preparation for Jesse being born. “Well, if we need more money, maybe I could — ”

“Nope,” she said immediately. “No way.”

“Wouldn’t have to be anythin’ _illegal,_ as such. I could… branch out and try my hand at honest work,” he insisted. “Can’t be that hard. I’d just have to lie about my age and make some fake ID or somethin’, it’d be _easy_.”

“You,” she said, poking his forehead with her finger, “are goin’ to be focusing on school stuff for years to come before you even think about any of that, and not talk so loudly about committing flagrant identity fraud where anyone could hear you. Besides, you help out around the place enough for two grown men, dunno what I’d do if you disappeared off to, I don’t know, work at the gas station or somethin’.”

He gave a grunt of dismissal. “Sandy knows how old I am anyway, wouldn’t be fooled no matter how good the forgery w — er. Got you loud and clear, ma’am, school stuff first. No fraud.”

“Glad to find we see eye to eye on this.”

A smile; he glanced down at the floor, scratching the back of his neck before meeting her eyes again. “...you sure there’s nothin’ else I can do? I — I wanna help.”

Her chest went soft and aching and she gently squeezed his shoulder. “Jesse, you’re already doing… more than enough. We’re gonna be okay. Just — please, stay out of trouble. No more fistfights, huh?”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Promise,” he added when she gave him a long flat look. “Not even if _he_ was the one who threw the first pathetic baby punch, as the case may or may not _definitely_ be.”

“You come to me if he doesn’t leave you be,” she repeated. “I got a shotgun and a hell of a lot less to lose than you. Hey, you want to wash up, change into somethin’ clean and help me get dinner started?”

His eyes glittered at the shotgun comment and honestly, it had been worth undercutting her message a bit for that. “Sure. What’re we having?”

As it turned out they were having whatever they could cobble together with what was in the fridge, ending in one of Jesse’s surprisingly delicious — if sometimes unorthodox — chilis. By the time it was done and they were ready to eat it was getting dark outside, a gentle wind whistling around the corners of the house.

He hissed under his breath as the spice in the chili hit his split lip, giving her the stink eye when she looked at him with blithely lifted eyebrows.

“What?” she asked innocently, bringing her glass to her mouth. “I didn’t even say anythin’.”

“Haven’t _you_ ever been in a fight before, ma’am?” he demanded, seemingly more a rhetorical whine than a serious question.

She spluttered as some of the water she’d been drinking went the wrong way, then laughed so hard it brought on a brief coughing fit.

“Oh, have I,” she managed finally, wiping at her sweater with a paper towel as Jesse stared at her, half befuddled and half amused. “I could tell you stories, boy. I was at that game before you were even a twinkle in someone’s eye, that’s how I know it never ends well.”

He blinked at her for a moment as if he’d never seen her before, then narrowed his eyes in that way he had, like he was thinking it through, turning it over and studying it anew from every direction. “Really?”

“I was young, angry, built like a brick wall and queer,” she said airily. “It was a natural fit.”

“Huh.” He kicked his feet idly against the leg of the chair, watching her with his head on one side. “Tell me ‘bout it?”

“You want me to incriminate myself just like that, relinquish whatever shreds of authority I’ve managed to hold on to?” But it was rare enough that he asked her about anything like that straight out that she sobered up and thought about it. “Well. I used to have one hell of a temper on me when I was younger,” she said, adding: “Though I’m sure that’s hard to believe, lookin’ at me now.”

He quirked a smile, taking the invitation. “I’ll try to suspend my disbelief for the purposes of this conversation, ma’am,” he said gravely.

“Hm. It was mostly in my late teens, and I’ll admit that sometimes alcohol was involved. You read a lot of books, you know how it goes. There’s a reason I haven’t touched a drop of whiskey since I was twenty two, and Lord knows there were enough assholes around who needed a good punching. Happened again a couple of times after I came home from college too, though. My dad had just passed away and my brother had disappeared off to god knew where and I’d thought — I’d thought I’d have at least a few more years in school, just me and Amy. I was so in love with her I could barely see straight, and there I was a thousand miles away from her scrambling through paperwork and lawyers tryin’ to make sure we didn’t just… lose the farm, all unceremoniously like that, after all those generations. Dad had let things slide pretty bad towards the end. Guess I should’ve taken an interest in things sooner, he _was_ getting on in years, but he always seemed so — and you know how it is, he didn’t tell any of us jack shi — squat about bein’ sick until he literally lay there dying.”

She paused. Her father, who had always seemed timeless and indestructible, almost right up until the end, as enduring as a rock wall and twice as stubborn. Amy had teased it out of her eventually, that that was part of why she’d been so mad at him for a while. On some level she’d thought he’d always be there, solid and reassuring even when she was miles away, and then he’d just _died_ and left them all to untangle the mess he’d left behind as best they could. Huh. To think that it still hurt a bit, so many years later, even though she made peace with him long ago.

“But you guys did get married eventually, though, right?” Jesse asked, fork hovering over his plate. “So you must’ve stayed in contact somehow.”

Shaking herself out of it she said: “Oh, of course. At that point I would’ve learned how to train messenger pigeons and sent those out, if that was what it took. We spoke on the phone most days, did video chats a couple of times a week — we didn’t have those fancy holograms you get these days, where it’s almost like you’re in the room together, but we made do. And she’d come visit me, during the holidays and stuff. We’d both save up so she could afford the ticket. Don’t know that I could’ve done it without her. Or rather,” she corrected herself, “I probably still would’ve, I’ve always been stubborn as a mule and don’t know when to quit. But without her I reckon I would’ve ended up pretty unhappy about it. Actually, it was… ”

She had a quick debate with herself about whether to tell him this part, but hell, he was smart enough to know if she was trying to cover something up, what was the point.

“It was one of the times she came to visit me that made me get my act together for good. She was arriving the next day and I felt… nervous, I guess. Restless. We hadn’t seen each other in person for almost a year, stuff had just kept gettin’ in the way. Suppose I wanted a distraction, on some level. It was some random shitty guy in a random shitty bar, he was just talkin’ real loud about — doesn’t matter, no one seems to care that much about that stuff anymore since the war broke out, thank god. Suffice to say that I was right to be mad, but probably not to get into a fistfight with him and his friend and wrecking the place between us.”

He grinned, the cheeky little menace. “You win?”

She snorted. “Don’t think anyone won that fight, kid. You find that ends up bein’ a running theme, if you manage to stick with it long enough. Well, Amy saw my face at the airport the next day and she just started _crying_ and I sorta realized…” She pushed her glass with her fingertips, moving it around on the tabletop in a rough square. “It wasn’t helpin’, what I was doing. That guy had run his mouth and been generally awful, sure, but it wasn’t really him I was angry at in the first place, and all I had to show for it all was a split second’s satisfaction as the punch landed, sprained knuckles, and my girlfriend in tears as she put frozen peas on my shiner and fussed over my broken nose.”

He looked pensive, moving to bite his lip and then seeming to think better of it as his teeth brushed over the scab. “What _were_ you angry about?” he asked abruptly.

And there he was, wanting the truth at the most inopportune moments, when he seemed to find it merely an inconvenience and an obstacle most of the time.

Perhaps this was something that it was important for him to hear, though. Taking a deep breath she said: “‘Cause there was so much unfairness in the world and there was nothing I could do about it. ‘Cause all I wanted was to kiss Amy goodnight every night and make her laugh with silly jokes, and she was on the other side of the damn country. ‘Cause my brother ran off like a rat fleeing the sinking ship, and my sister was too wrapped up in her own stuff to be much help, and it felt like my dad had just left us _._ I was angry because there was someone I’d meant to become when I left for college, and I’d had to leave her behind. And none of that,” she added, “was something I could solve simply by punching things, wish as I might. Most real problems are like that.”

“...then what _do_ you do with ‘em?” he asked, looking like a fresh dewy-eyed mountaineer who’d just learned of the existence of Mount Everest.

“Don’t know. Don’t think anyone really does, and if they say they do they’re usually tryin’ to sell you something. But sometimes you gotta know when to fold ‘em on something that doesn’t work and walk off to try somethin’ new, I guess. Maybe find someone to talk to, get help, maybe go someplace else, get some distance and perspective — maybe just give yourself some time to really think things over and go from there. No one way to do it, probably. But it can be done.”

The cat came in and gazed soulfully up at Jesse until he let it jump up and settle in his lap.

“Hey, kitty,” he murmured, scritching it behind the ears as it curled into a contented purring coil in his lap. He looked up at Mariah. “That all sounds… real complicated, I’ll be honest with you, ma’am.”

She laughed, deciding that might be enough of terrifying him with life lessons for one evening. “Oh, you’ll figure it out, Jesse. Dumber people than you have managed it, you’ll be just fine. Get someone you trust to watch your back and use your head out there, and you’re halfway there already.”

“I’ve usually found that using my head is what gets me _into_ problems,” he muttered, scratching the cat under the chin.

“...in your specific case that might very well be true,” she conceded. “But I suppose there ain’t nothin’ for it but giving it the old college try anyway.”

He smiled, some of the tension leaving him. “Taking the Hail Mary shot at it, I hear you. Guess it’s either that or goin’ all in on getting one hell of a partner to watch my back while I stumble through.”

“Worked out okay for me,” Mariah said, and for the first time in a long time it didn’t hurt like a stab in the chest, thinking about Amy head on like that. For one moment she could hold her in her heart without feeling like she was going to die from it.

They ate, and talked some more, and the darkness outside was dense and forgiving.

 

— — — — —

 

In the following months they got through the harvest time relatively painlessly, all things considered. A few of the horses had some smaller ailments — Donny must be more ailment than horse at this point, but he still seemed happy to while away his days alternating between dozy grazing and contented flatulence — and Dr. Harris swooped back in to fix them up like a sweet balding angel with very reasonable rates. Jesse took to wearing the Stetson around the place, after asking permission, and it was only half as comically overlarge on him now as it had been.

They were making dinner in the golden afternoon sunlight one day, Jesse newly arrived and washing his hands at the kitchen sink while Mariah tended the pan.

“Christine said Donny walked into the fence today,” he told her, shaking water from his hands before darting for the towel.

She stopped and glanced at him over her shoulder in surprise. “He tried to escape? _Donny?_ ”

“No, no,” Jesse clarified as he dried his hands. “He just… walked against the post for a while. Seemed to find it soothing, she said.”

“...suppose I’ve known my share of people who’ve been at their happiest beating their heads against a wall repeatedly,” Mariah conceded. “That, or his eyesight might be goin’ for good. I’ll get the vet to have another look at him.”

Jesse sat down at the table and starting clearing away the books that littered the tabletop, putting them into a neat stack in the windowsill. “Probably a good idea. Oooh, we havin’ french fries?” he added, beaming.

“Uh-huh. Who was that pale haired girl you were hanging around with yesterday, by the way?” she asked, flipping the bacon. “Didn’t mean to spy, but I saw the two of you chatting when I went into town and I can’t say I recognized her. Just tell me to back off if it’s none of my business, I guess.”

He stiffened. Hm. Interesting. “Oh. Uh, she’s a… friend. Kinda.”

She turned to look at him, lifting her eyebrows. “Wow. A — long pause — kinda friend, huh?”

For a moment he looked honestly puzzled, then he made a face and shook his head vigorously. “What? _No_ , not like _that_! Jeez, ma’am.”

She took a moment to look him over properly. He was just starting to enter that same lanky, ungainly growth spurt that had been the bane of Sam’s existence for a couple of years there, but he seemed to grow broader at the same time, less spindly and soft and confounded by the movements of his own limbs than poor Sam had been. His hair was tousled from the hat and the wind, and he’d grown sweetly freckled by the sun, the gentlest smattering over his nose and forearms. If she knew anything about it — and to be fair she didn’t much, it had never really been her field — she would say that he was going to be a very handsome young man someday soon. And yet… “No,” she agreed thoughtfully, turning back to the eggs. “No, not like that, huh.”

Apparently eager to change the topic as quickly as possible (so something _was_ up, then, just not in that way), he got up to set the table and said: “Did everything go okay in the stables today? The farrier came in on time?”

“All good,” she said, smiling at his back as he hurried to put the trivet down for her when she lifted the pan off the stove. “How about you, did you finish your schoolwork already?”

“‘Course,” he said easily.

She gave the back of his head a very gentle swat after putting the pan down. “If you’re gonna lie through your teeth, kid, at least do it well.”

He grinned at her and oh yes, he’d be out there breaking hearts before she even had time to turn around, you could be sure of that. “I’m workin’ on it, ma’am.”

“The schoolwork or the lying?”

With a cheerful tilt of his head he got the water jug and went to the tap to fill it before returning to the table.

“Jesse McCree, you’ll be the death of me,” she sighed, getting the french fries before sitting down.

His face did a little twitch. “...don’t say shit like that, ma’am.” Then, at her look: “Stuff. Stuff like that. Sorry.”

She smiled, a bit ruefully. “I’m sorry too. I won’t joke about stuff like that. Come on, let’s eat before it gets cold.”

They ate in companionable silence for a while. She snuck glances at him here and there, until he caught her out one time too many.

“Aw, alright _._ What’s that look about?” he demanded.

“Nothin’, nothin’,” she said. “Just… thinking.”

He gave her a peevish unimpressed look around a piece of boiled broccoli, which had been the only edible vegetable in the fridge. “Uh-huh. Pull the other one, ’s got bells on. You’re still dyin’ to ask, aren’t you.”

She held her hands up in concession, duly chastised. “Ain’t never heard you talk about havin’ a friend before, so I got curious, that’s all. Like I said, we don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’ll stop.”

“...I don’t think I’m very good at that stuff,” Jesse said, in the tones of someone in the confession booth trying to work out from the priest’s response whether what they just admitted to was a sin or not. “Friends and shi — stuff. I always moved around too much to really… it’s like all these kids just _know_ how to do it and I don’t.”

There was a twinge of something like frustration in that last part. He leaned his cheek in one hand and picked at his food with the fork in the other, hair falling into his face.

She’d put off this conversation because she honestly hadn’t known what she’d tell him — she’d hardly been a social butterfly herself at any stage of her life. Most of her friendships in adult life had been through or at least shared with Amy, and they’d all been scattered by the war. “Well, uh. You seem to have managed it at least once before?”

He pulled a face and speared a french fry with his fork. “Dunno. Like I said, I ain’t so sure ‘friend’ is, uh. The right word for it.”

“So not a friend and not _that_ kinda ‘friend’ either,” she said dryly. “What is she, then, a business associate? Partner in crime? Fellow Western enthusiast?”

Jesse made a high strangled sound and choked on the water he’d been drinking, coughing as she hurriedly got up to pat him on the back.

“You okay there, partner?”

He waved a hand. “Fine,” he managed, “I’m fine, sorry.”

“Try to get it down the right way next time, cowboy,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “It’d be a dumb way to go, drowning in the desert.”

With a few quick blinks to clear the tears in his eyes he rasped: “Kinda poetic and ironic and shit, though, so not the _worst_ way.”

“Stop talkin’ nonsense and finish your broccoli,” she sighed, ruffling his hair fondly before sitting down again.

“You ask so much of me. Turnin’ that back on you, though, ma’am; _you_ clearly managed to figure it out at least once, you’ve gotta know how this stuff works better than me, at least.”

“Huh?”

He shrugged one shoulder in a way meant to look nonchalant, but he was watching her too intently to really pull it off. “I mean… you were married and everythin’, right?”

She laughed. “Yeah, well, we were a lot more than friendly, Jesse, we raised two kids together.”

“You know what I _mean_ ,” he said, rolling his eyes.

She pushed the saltshaker around in a grid pattern on the table top. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right, I’m bein’ facetious, sorry. She was my best friend as well. Just don’t know how applicable it’ll be for your situation here.”

Jesse got a small wrinkle between his eyebrows, like when he was struggling through a complicated equation. “How so?”

“Amy was, uh. It was different, with her, pretty much from the start. We knew each other for a few months and she made everything seem so much funnier and kinder and more interesting whenever I simply stood next to her and one day I just sorta… knew. And I guess my guardian angel burned through a couple of all-nighters, pulled some strings on my behalf, ‘cause as it turned out she liked me too, for some godforsaken reason. And then we were indecently happily married for thirty five years.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll admit that doesn’t seem like the easiest process to replicate,” Jesse allowed.

“Exactly. No idea how I pulled it off in the first place. Can’t exactly offer step by step instructions.”

“I hadn’t even thought about _that_ whole side of things,” Jesse said morosely. “With the romance angle and so on, I mean. This is like… one of them Russian doll situations. One complication nestled inside another.”

She burst out laughing. “Hey now, cowboy, don’t dig yourself a hole and lie down in it just yet, it ain’t all _that_ complicated. We’re not talking rocket science here. If you’re anything like me, you’ll know it when it happens. Or it won’t happen at all, it’s not for everyone; ‘s all fine. Guess my two cents would be that there’s no need to stress about it until it seems relevant, because being in love is all the stress you need.”

Jesse poked at some bacon with his fork and brought it to his mouth. “Dunno, the poets have seemed pretty keen on the idea through the ages, by and large.”

“That’s ‘cause most poets are poor melodramatic saps sustained by the theatrical and overwrought,” Mariah said, diplomatically. “Me, I just thought I was havin’ a continual heart attack for three months. Much preferred the period after that, when you can work on being good to each other without all the adrenaline muddling things. Guess solid long-term partnership is harder to make exciting in verse, though. Rough to find a good rhyme for ‘I’ll live, die and kill for you as well as help you with your tax returns if you’d like, honey’.”

He snorted but smiled a little as he filled his glass again.

She hesitated. “Do you… _want_ to get to know some of the kids in town better? ‘Cause I could, you know, help you arrange somethin’, if that’s what you…”

He shook his head, which was about what she had expected. “Nah. Ain’t like that, really, it’s… I don’t think we — have a lot in common.”

 _I bet, kid_. Strange, too smart for his own good and with a whole lot of past to drag along. Not the easiest starting point, in this small town even the war hadn’t managed to make too exciting.

“Listen, you said it yourself, you haven’t had the chance to really get to know that many people. Might just be that you haven’t met the right crowd yet. When you find the right people you’ll know it, and the rest’ll follow, if they’ve got any sense at all. I’d put money on that.”

He scratched the back of his neck and smiled down at his plate. “If you say so, ma’am. Though I think you’ll find unauthorized gambling’s illegal in these parts.”

She pretended to narrow her eyes at him. “And how exactly have you come by this knowledge, young man?”

“No reason,” he smirked, giving an extravagant, openly bullshitting shrug. “Looked it up in the spirit of inquiry. Natural curiosity about the depths of human depravity, I’m just reaching that point in a young man’s life where I wonder ‘bout these things.”

“My little ruffian, lost at such a tender age to the lure of pure and untarnished intellectual curiosity,” she drawled, and his eyes glittered at the shared joke lobbed back and forth over the table like a lazy meandering tennis match. “Doesn’t bear thinkin’ about.”

“I’m a scholar at heart, ma’am, what can I say,” he said earnestly. “And people who’re busy thinkin’ about money they’re about to win are surprisingly unlikely to notice someone picking their pockets for the cash they already have. Not, uh, that I’d do that anymore,” he added, looking briefly troubled.

With a chuckle she shook her head at him and played with the saltshaker some more. One day she was going to let him down, she knew, like she had everyone else who had ever really mattered. She hoped it was a long way off still. “Well, Professor, I’m just sayin’ that you should try some patience, because one day you’ll meet people smart enough to realize you’re worth it.”

“ _Ma’am_ ,” he said in a strange mix of a complaint and a startled squeak, squirming on his chair. “Can’t just come out and…”  

“What? It’s just the truth, kid. Where’d that ardent search for academic veracity go all of a sudden?” She took pity on his furiously blushing face. “Hm. In the meantime I guess you’ll just have to make do with me and the girls and old Donny. Though I can’t comment on who makes for the better-smelling company between us.”

He grinned, the sweetest quickest little thing, the pink still high in his cheeks. “That doesn’t seem so bad at all, ma’am.”

Well, that was good to hear, at least. She did worry sometimes, that he would get lonely here. “And this girl?”

“Don’t reckon I’ll see her again any time soon,” he said, dismissively. “We… pretty much said everything we needed to, I think.”

“Okay, if you say so. You’re welcome to invite her back here if you change your mind, though.”

“Mmh-hm,” Jesse said, telegraphing in every other way available to him that he found that extremely unlikely as he chomped down on another french fry.

She chuckled, putting the salt shaker back with its pepper shaker twin. “If there’s ever anyone you _do_ want to bring, they’ll be welcome here. Is what I’m tryin’ to say.”

After a moment he nodded, giving a smile that looked almost shy. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind, ma’am.”

 

— — — — —

 

“Ma’am?” Jesse called from out in the hall.

She sipped her coffee, still working on banishing the morning grogginess. “Kitchen, cowboy.”

He showed up in the doorway, a smudge of dirt on one side of his face and a preoccupied look on his face that persisted even as he smiled brightly.

“Hey, I’m goin’ out on a ride,” he said. “You wanna come with? It’s a really pretty morning out.”

“Sure, that sounds nice,” she said, some distant alarm bell going off in the back of her head. There was something off about his posture, the lightness of his smile undercut by tension. She finished the last mouthfuls of her coffee and went with him.

It _was_ a beautiful morning, she had to hand him that; the land lay quiet and serene but for the calls of a few early birds, the sun rising soft over the rocks and into the pale blue of a wide open sky.

They let the horses decide the pace, a leisurely ride along paths they both knew like the backs of their hands at this point. She let him pull ahead a bit to watch his form — he really was becoming a fine rider, his tendency to lift his hands too high when he got uncertain completely gone; he was as relaxed on horseback as he was on the ground now, attentive to the mood and movement of the horse.

When it was about time to start thinking about returning Jesse rode up to her side as they slowed down.

“Wanna sit down and smell the roses a bit before we head back?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows with forced cheer.

Distantly starting to wonder who the hell had died and why no one had told her yet, she said: “Good idea.”

They stopped at a likely-looking place, a small elevation that gave quite the view of the plain beneath it. The horses grazed contentedly nearby, barely sparing the humans a glance.

“...it’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it,” Jesse said, gazing out over it all with something like melancholy and something like awe.

She gave a hum of agreement, watching him intently out of the corner of her eye. Damn, when did he get so _tall_. She could swear it was only last week he’d reached her to the shoulder, and now she was starting to have to crane her neck to look at him. This was Sam all over again.

When he didn’t say anything else for a while Mariah lit a cigarette and leaned against the lone scraggly tree clinging to this hunk of rock, waiting for him. If he was all but twitching out of his skin over it, it was probably important.

Then, finally, he made his move. “Hey, uh, I’ve been thinking.”

Sweet Jesus, it was worse than she’d feared. She finished her cigarette. “Have you now? I heard tell that’s a dangerous line of business to dabble in.”

“Yeah, well, you know me, ma’am,” he said, ducking his head modestly. “I like livin’ on the edge.”

With an amused sound she glanced over at him and folded her arms over her chest. “Let’s hear it, then, partner. Shoot.”

Dragging his feet a while longer he scratched the back of his neck, then said: “You’ve heard people talkin’ about the gangs who’ve started turning up all over the place, right?”

“Little more than a bunch of ragtag raiders and looters, most of them, from what I gathered. Basically what you’d expect after a war, if history’s got anythin’ to say about it. But go on.”

“Heard they hit a place a county over last week,” Jesse said, with deceptive lightness.

Uh-oh. “Heard something like that too,” she said.

“And they move pretty quick.”

“They seem to have, so far. Guess they have those hoverbikes.”

“Things could be gettin’ a little more dangerous around these parts pretty fast, is what I mean.”

She lifted her eyebrows sunnily, letting him have some more rope.

He took a deep breath. “So I was thinkin’ — I overheard some rumors that if you know who to ask, there are people in town who can set you up with — ”

“I know exactly who you’re talkin’ about, and the answer is a resounding no,” she said, “No, I’m not sending you into town with cash so you can buy some old janky pre-war gun from the sketchiest goddamn people I know.”

The government had been desperately scrambling to restrict the amount of firearms in private ownership again in the years after the war, as they had once before in the mid-2020ies; the only people in town dumb enough to let it slip that they had some for sale weren’t the kind you’d trust with the simplest water pistol.

“But — ”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did that sound — ” _like_ _an invitation to a discussion_ , she’d meant to say, but that would have been a shitty fucking thing to do to him, so instead she reined herself in and said: “Jesse, you’re fourteen; I’m not gonna let you walk around with a gun. I understand why you’re worried. Only natural. But let’s try to be rational about this: what do we have that any raider like that might want?”

He floundered a bit.

“Unless they’re after hay or horses, which I sincerely doubt, we ain’t got much to offer. Even the holoset is a decade old at this point. We’re not exactly a prime target, is what I’m saying, they’d be better off hitting pretty much anyone else.”

He rallied. “They don’t have any way of knowing any of that, though, do they? One of the gangs could just be comin’ out here to try their luck, and then we’d be in deep sh — in real trouble, ma’am.”

She scoffed. “They’d never haul their asses all the way out here, not even the omnics bothered with this place.”

“You can’t _know_ that!” Heat was rising in his cheeks, belying the calm reasoned tone he was clearly aiming for. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “I mean, is it worth goin’ for the gamble on this one?”

She squinted at him, not sure she was following either of the two entirely separate conversations they seemed to be having. “Kid, I… what’s this really about, Jesse?”

He threw his hands up with what he must fondly imagine to be cheerful reassurance and, in actuality, stoked the smouldering embers of her worry like a pair of bellows. “Nothin’! Nothin’, I’m just saying — pays to be prepared, right? God helps those who help themselves and so on.”

“Well now, plenty of things we could try before we need go bother the big man himself.”

“Like what? Have you _seen_ what passes for the law in town? Those guys are more likely to be in cahoots with the bandits in return for a cut than they are to ever do anythin’ useful, even by accident,” Jesse said hotly. “And even if they _weren’t_ crooked as all hell, all you’d have to do is leave a trail of donut crumbs leading in the opposite direction, and you’d have all the peace and quiet you needed for the rest of the day! Not exactly the best and brightest, are they?”

He was right, of course: the law had been thrown out the window and set on fire during the war, and it was taking its sweet time to crawl back in now that it was over. The parts of the force that had managed to remain seemed to her to be the expected cockroaches and little else.

“I’m… not gonna say you’re completely wrong about that, ‘cause it’s supposed to be a sin to tell a lie,” she said slowly.

“See?”

“ _However_ ,” she continued, “I think you’ll find there are more problems a gun can’t solve than things it can. It even comes with a whole bunch of new problems all its own.”

The war had taught her that, if nothing else. Urban warfare was always ugly, making it almost as likely to be killed by friendly fire as by the enemy’s, especially since the omnics hadn’t had any compunctions about things like using human shields. A bullet didn’t stop until it hit something, and it didn’t care if what it met was concrete, flesh or metal; it tore everything up the same. She’d once thought weapons — well, if not admirable, then necessary, at least on a farm out of the way like this. She grew up knowing how to use one. But whatever taste she’d ever had for it had died after seeing the bodies of too many children who’d been caught in the crossfire, accidentally hit by someone trying to save them.

She’d taught both Sam and Amy to use a gun, and look how much of a difference that had made in the end.

Apparently sensing it was time for a fresh angle here Jesse gestured with a hand and pointed out: “It’s not like you’ve never thought about it before, you already have the shotgun!”

“It used to be my dad’s, and it has barely been loaded since the war ended,” she said. “It’s mostly for the look of the thing at this point; if it’s between just dyin’ and having to deal with a charge of manslaughter, lawyers flapping around me all the while, I know which one I prefer.”

Some of the fight temporarily went out of him as he stared at her. “...it’s just to scare people?”

“And animals, and whatever else might stumble onto my property unbidden,” she said airily. “I load it with rocksalt sometimes, but it’s usually the sound that scares ‘em off, people and raccoon alike. Omnics, not so much, that’s mostly what I keep the real stuff for. Not that it would’ve been much use during the war, I guess, if they’d really put their tinfoil brains to it. Mostly so I could have the satisfaction of taking a couple of ‘em down with me, if it should come to it.”

He rallied again. “Well then, all the more reason we should — ”

She rubbed at her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. “Jesse… ”

“I wanna be able to help if somethin’ bad happens,” Jesse insisted. “I’m a good shot, I’ll show you, I know how to use it safely, I could —”

“Do what, kid? Make them think you’re more of a threat and actually have ‘em shoot you? You like our chances, one old lady and one fourteen year old against a band of robbers? This ain’t a movie, and I’m not too keen on the two of us goin’ out in blaze of glory, I’ll be honest with you.”

He flinched at that, and she felt a stab of regret she didn’t quite know what to do with. She sighed.

“Even if you had one — Jesse, pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger are two very different things.”

Something vast and dark and complicated came over his face, like a thunderstorm crashing in over the horizon. His body language changed, from the boy who lived under her roof and made her laugh at least twice a day to something… else.

“I know,” he said.

The words hung in the air for a while, stark and lonely.

She closed her eyes for a second and let her head fall back. Yeah. She really was the world’s biggest fucking idiot. “Of course,” she said. “Of course you do. I’m sorry, Jesse.”

There was another long silence, tense like a bowstring.

“I didn’t, by the way,” he said, anger running like a dark and harsh river under the ice in his tone. “If that makes you any happier. I probably would’ve, if other shit hadn’t gotten in the way before I could. But in the end I didn’t.”

“Wouldn’t have made a lick of difference to me if you had,” she said. “Told you that years ago.”

“I — really?” he said, unhappy and disbelieving. “Even that? I would’ve _killed_ that guy if I’d had a few more seconds and I don’t know — I don’t know that I’d feel bad about it after, either. He was _hurtin’_ people and…” His voice broke a bit, but he gritted his teeth and added: “And he probably would’ve hurt me too, if he ever got the chance. Some days I think it was wrong of me to let him go, like if he hurts someone else it’s half my fault now. And no one is gonna make him _pay_ for any of it.”

Something happened then. She thought, for that one moment, she caught a glimpse of the man he was going to be one day, sharp-eyed and guarded under his smiles and burning with righteousness like a wildfire.

_Oh, kid._

“Weren’t your fault. I’m sorry you had to be in that situation in the first place, it never should’ve been like that.”

He breathed unsteadily, his whole narrow frame moving with it. “But I…”

“You were a child,” she said, as gentle as she knew how to be. “You still are, a while longer. And I know that sounds stupid and like I’m tryin’ to brush off what happened, but I hope — I hope that one day you can look back and see that too.”

His mouth worked silently, then set in a grim line. He sat down on the rock, turned slightly away from her, arms folded over his chest like he was warding off a chill.

She settled on the rock next to him. “Have you been worried ‘bout me finding out about this all this time?”

He stayed still for a long time, then shrugged offhandedly in a way that told her that yes, he very much had.

“...is it okay if I touch you?” she asked. After a moment he nodded jerkily and she wrapped her arm around his shoulders, pulling him slightly towards her. First he stayed stiff and unresponsive, but then he let his head rest on her shoulder and allowed her to take some of his weight.

“When you said you didn’t care about what I’d done I thought you meant, like… lyin’ and cheatin’ and stealin’ and stuff,” Jesse said eventually. “Not that I tried to kill someone. That I _wanted_ to kill someone. ‘Cause I’ve done all of those but that feels… different.”

“Sounded to me like that guy had done some pretty awful stuff,” she said. He nodded vigorously, his shoulders growing tense again. “So… maybe it wasn’t so much that you just wanted to kill him — you wanted to stop him and that was the only way you could think of to do it. I’m glad you didn’t have to, in the end. But it’s easy to see why you would.”

He sat in black sullen silence for a while. “I guess. But I was angry too. At him. For — for makin’ me feel that way. All… small and scared and stupid. And for doin’ all that stuff because he knew he would get away with it, and he thought that was — funny. Only when I turned the gun on him that he…”

His eyes went distant, lost in some memory.

“Bein’ angry about something like that sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” she said, squeezing his shoulder gently to bring him back.

A small hurt sound fell out of him, his hands curling into fists against his thighs.

“Seeing something bad happen and wanting to do somethin’ about it ain’t nothing to be ashamed about,” she muttered, moving her hand to the back of his head to stroke his hair. “It’s a good instinct to have, so long as you know how to use it.”

“But it never makes any fucking difference anyway,” he said, his voice thick. “Bad shit just _keeps happenin’,_ no matter what anyone does.”

She pressed a careful kiss to his hair as he wiped roughly at his face with his sleeve. “You don’t always know what’ll make a difference, in the end. That’s the way of history. Sometimes you just have to act on faith that something will.“

He sniffed, rubbing his face against her coat. For a while they stayed like that.

Finally she said: “You at least know how to handle a weapon, then. Wouldn’t have to worry about you shooting yourself in the foot on top of everything else.”

“Yeah. I had that gun before, but I… I lost it when I managed to get away. When I broke my arm. That was the only time I tried to use it on someone, though. We held up some people with it for food once, but that was, er… I didn’t load it that time. Think they ended up givin’ us some bread more ‘cause they felt sorry for us than because they were scared,” he said. After a moment he added: “I was pretty good with it, though, if I do say so myself. Used to do trick shooting. For fun, mostly, but I made some money off of it too. Apparently the only talent I got.”

She blew an unimpressed raspberry, stroking the back of his neck with a thumb. “You got talents coming out of your ears, kid, don’t give me that.”

“...if you say so, ma’am,” he mumbled, turning his face into her shoulder and letting her rock him back and forth a bit for a few minutes.

“We’ll see,” she said finally. “I won’t get you a rusting old boomstick from the yokels in town, but I’ll think about some ways to make sure the farm is safe and talk to you about it, I promise. Maybe we could go to a shooting range someday and you could show me what you’ve got. And in a couple of years, when you’re older, we’ll talk it over again. That sound like a compromise we can both live with?”

After a moment’s pause he nodded, scuffing his feet over the rocky ground. “Yeah. Okay. I can work with that.”

She had a feeling there was a silent _for now_ tacked on to the end there, but she’d take it. For now. “Good.”

It was starting to be time for them to head back, but…

She sat up straighter, glancing out over the landscape. “Y’know, actually, while we’re here… there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while — oh, nothin’ bad, don’t worry,” she laughed as she felt him tense up again, stroking his back in slow soothing circles. “It’s just that we’re getting in a young gelding soon to train. I was wonderin’ if maybe you’d want to… be involved in that. I’ll be there every step of the way and help you, of course, but he’d kinda be _your_ horse. If you wanted.”

For a long moment he almost looked like he hadn’t heard her. Then a small disbelieving smile trembled onto his face and he looked down at his feet, a happy flush rising in his cheeks.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

“It’s a lot of work,” she felt moved to warn him, just to make sure he knew.

He smiled down at his hands resting in his lap. “That’s fine.”

“That’s good, then,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “Good.”

A bird called out shrilly somewhere far overhead.

 

— — — — —

 

Her suspicion at his easy agreement grew deeper over the next few weeks. He was clearly trying to hide it, his smiles and quick comments coming as readily as ever, but it was impossible to miss the restlessness that crept over him once more.

The nightmares came back too; once when she heard him whimpering and went into his room he didn’t wake properly for a long time, caught in a strange half-conscious haze where he didn’t seem to recognize she was there but simply wept inconsolably for a good five minutes before she managed to get through to him enough that he realized where he was. Even then she could get nothing coherent out of him; he just clung to her and cried some more, but less desperate this time, not so out of her reach.  

He only calmed down and fell asleep again when she stroked his hair and sang quietly for him, old lullabies in Spanish she had almost thought she’d forgotten. She sat next to his bed for a long time after he drifted off again, still stroking his hair.

Later he seemed almost as confused about it as she was, by all appearances unable to explain what had happened in words, only giving a helpless shrug when she gently tried to ask the next morning. He seemed equal parts bewildered and almost embarrassed, so she let him be about it for the time being, figuring she’d make it clear she was there to talk about it when he felt ready instead of pushing it.

“I’m fine, ma’am, honest,” he insisted, the bruise-dark circles under his eyes betraying him even as the smile didn’t.

She watched his back as he crossed the yard towards the stables, trying and failing to find the words that might get through.

 

— — — — —

 

And then one day he didn’t come home.

It didn’t occur to her that something was off before she realized it was getting dark outside and she hadn’t seen any sign of him since early that morning. Huh. That was strange. He usually told her if he’d be late for dinner, at least, in a quick text message if nothing else. She checked the time on her phone and found that yeah, they were already running a bit late.

He was not in his room, or the living room, or anywhere else in the house. There was a stack of library books on the living room table he’d put in two neat piles, ready to be taken back into town, but no sign of him.

She did a quick search of the stables — he slept in there, sometimes, when it was warm enough out and he couldn’t fall asleep; the smells and sounds in there seemed to comfort him. After the near-heartattack it had given her, that first time when she hadn’t found him in his room, it hadn’t proved to be a problem. He wasn’t in there now, though.

“Hey,” she said, waving down Christine and Celia when she spotted them. “You guys seen the kid lately?”

They glanced at each other and something cold and shivery settled in the pit of Mariah’s stomach.

“Wasn’t he with you?” Christine asked. “We thought it was a bit weird we hadn’t seen him at all since this morning.”

“Thought you had him locked up in there doing some school stuff,” Celia said, shifting the coiled rope over her shoulder to a more comfortable position.

Mariah rested her hands on her hips and looked around, as if she expected to see some trace of him if she just swept her eyes over everything thoroughly enough.

The cat came over and gazed at her until she leaned down and picked it up, then purred quietly and rubbed its head against the underside of her chin as it curled up against her.

“No,” she said, slowly petting the cat. “No, he wasn’t with… hm. Maybe he went off exploring again and somethin’ happened to his phone. Well, I’m sure he’ll turn up before it gets properly dark, anyway.”

He didn’t.

The next few weeks were a haze, a strange foggy landscape of fear she hadn’t thought she would ever revisit. She went out searching, she slept sometimes — she tried not to think too much.

It was only when she saw the first wanted poster that she could breathe again.

 

EPILOGUE

 

Hanzo picks up the picture frame from the shelf and studies the photo, stunned.

“You were _adorable_ ,” he says, running his thumb along the frame.

“Not you too,” Jesse murmurs.

In the picture Jesse is perhaps thirteen years old and on horseback, shading his eyes from the sun with a hand and grinning widely. He wears a Stetson hat that is slightly too big for him, and his hair is falling into his face, wild and ruffled in the wind. There is a red neckerchief tied haphazardly around his neck.

Hanzo briefly closes his eyes and lets his head fall forward until his forehead rests against Jesse’s shoulder. “I have no idea what to do with this,” he says, staring down at the photo.

“You _could_ put me out of my misery and stop makin’ a fuss about it,” Jesse suggests, turning his head and kissing Hanzo’s hair, nuzzling at his temple. “Wouldn’t peg you as the type to get emotional over old photos, anyhow, where’d this new character quirk come from?”

“You had _freckles_ ,” Hanzo insists, because on the one hand Jesse is absolutely right, he isn’t the type, but on the other… Jesse had _freckles_ when he was a boy, you can just pick them out against the warm brown of the rest of his skin. If there is one thing Hanzo is learning in later life it is that sometimes you must simply accept the new and unexpected things you discover about yourself.

“Still do, when I stay out in the sun too much.” He gives a sly bright grin, his hand coming to rest at the small of Hanzo’s back. “I’ll leave it to your imagination exactly where they tend to show up, though.”

“...I must find some way to break it to Agent Winston that we need a month off to go somewhere tropical,” Hanzo says, and Jesse chuckles. “Is this her?”

He points to a photo of an older woman, long greying hair gathered in a braid and keen dark eyes creased with a smile as she looks at her daughter and what must be her grandchildren. There is an air of calm, melancholy relief about her, like someone very tired who can finally sit down and rest.

“Yeah,” Jesse says quietly. “Yeah, that’s her.”

There is the sound of their host heading back into the living room and Hanzo immediately straightens his spine and puts the picture frame down to reunite with its siblings, pulling himself together. Jesse’s hand lingers against the small of his back for a few moments longer, though, warm and casual, the sort of understated public display of intimacy Hanzo has grown to allow himself over the years.

Louisa Sanchez is a tall lean woman, her short black hair shot through with grey and her cutting dark eyes softened by time with smile lines. She is clearly a civilian, but there is an air about her that suggests to Hanzo that if he were to go up against her he would prefer to do it in such a way that she wouldn’t have time to realize and retaliate. (The instinct to figure out how best to kill someone on first sight is, regrettably, exactly that; an instinct. He mostly uses it for protective purposes these days, to thwart other people like himself, but it is a laborious and multifaceted process.)

“I could get you a copy of that before you leave, if you’d like,” she offers, tilting her head towards the row of photos. “Wouldn’t be any trouble, got the files upstairs on Ma’s old computer.”

Jesse says: “Oh, I wouldn’t want to bother you with — ”

Hanzo says, slightly louder: “That would be very kind of you, thank you.”

Jesse looks at him. “Yeah, thank you very much, ma’am,” he says, in resigned tones. Hanzo knows him well enough to realize that he will knee jerk refuse an offer in the moment to avoid emotional complications and regret it later, when it’s too late. And Hanzo would quite like to be able to look at that picture again himself, as well.

With a look of real amusement she folds her arms over her chest and leans against the doorframe. “Good. I’ll see to it.”

In the background there is still the sound of her grandchildren playing in the living room, children’s voices raised in alternating amiable bickering and laughter.

“Thank you for the coffee, ma’am,” Jesse says finally. “Sorry we gotta leave so soon, there’s some, uh. Business we need to attend to.”

“Yeah, I bet. By all accounts you seem like a busy man, Mr. McCree — that bounty is a frankly _absurd_ amount of money.” She lifts her eyebrows. “Enough money that I won’t ask what the hell you did, because I suspect I don’t want to know. But Ma would’ve found some way to furiously haunt my sorry ass to eternity and back if I so much as thought about it. No amount of cash could make up for havin’ to explain that one to her ghost. Don’t you worry.”

“I appreciate that, ma’am,” Jesse says, in that way he has where he makes it simultaneously a conspiratorial joke and dead serious.

She smiles still, but looks wistful underneath. “You must’ve really gotten to her somehow, you know. Dunno what you did, but it stuck. Right up to the end, she was still talkin’ about…”

Hanzo feels more than sees Jesse’s body freeze up. He leans a little closer to him so their shoulders are touching, and feels Jesse relax at the contact.

“Almost had me a bit jealous in the beginning,” Louisa says lightly, apparently picking up on it too. “You took all the oomphf out of my prodigal son act. There’s not supposed to be more than one of us per family.”

“I can only apologize,” Jesse says. “At least you had the good sense to do the coming back part.”

“She called _me_ , actually. An unexpected olive branch, you could safely say; I’d never heard her be… _soft_ like that with anyone but Mom before, and Sammy sometimes. Guess age mellowed her out. That, and — well.”

Jesse just nods, and Hanzo is aware that there is another conversation going on here beneath the one he can understand.

“The place looks like it’s running pretty well these days,” Jesse says. “Saw there’s a new barn and everythin’.”

The shrug Louisa gives is one of modesty barely covering satisfaction. “Oh, we do okay. Always did want to take over the farm one day, but I sorta thought… well. I guess I always sorta thought Ma would be here too, handling the paperwork and the horses and stuff. Stupid, I know, but you know how it is. Seemed like she _was_ the place, in some ways.”

“Yeah,” Jesse says.

“She collected your wanted posters, by the way. Got quite the collection up in the attic even now. Said it was the only way to keep up with you these days.” She looks at him, and at his expression adds: “I think she found it kinda funny, for the record.”

“‘Course she did,” Jesse says, looking like he’s just stubbed a toe.

“Should have been there when she saw you on the holoset, I thought she was gonna bust a lung.”

Jesse tips his head on one side. “The holoset? When would she — oh. The UN thing.”

“The UN thing,” Louisa agrees. “Think it was the belt buckle that really got her.”

Hanzo keeps his face deliberately blank and feels the affection swell like a tidal wave against his breastbone. He has seen that footage too.

“Boss made me take it off before they started gettin’ photos,” Jesse mumbles, scratching the back of his neck. “Guess she must’ve caught it before that.”

She chuckles and gives him a long evaluating look, then seems to make up her mind about something. “I’ll show you where her grave is later, if you want.”

“That’d be good,” Jesse says. “Thank you very much, ma’am.”

A child, perhaps a little over a year old, is crawling determinedly over the floor, heading for her grandmother. She pauses when she reaches Hanzo and, apparently in the spirit of exploration, grabs onto his trouser leg before glancing speculatively up at him.

“...hello,” he says and gives her a respectful nod. She blinks phlegmatically at him, then frowns in concentration and tightens her grip on his clothes as she slowly, with great ceremony, manages to haul herself to her wobbling feet.

“Oh, well _done,_ Amelia,” Louisa Sanchez exclaims, clapping her hands in what seems like genuine excitement. The child gives a triumphant cackle and waddles the few remaining steps to her grandmother’s waiting arms to be picked up. “You’re getting the hang of this, kiddo!”

The toddler leans her head against Louisa’s shoulder in sweet thoughtless trust, wrapping her little hand around the drawstring of Louisa’s sweater. As always Hanzo feels awkward and ill at ease, brought face to face with innocence. It is not an area of the human condition he has much experience with.

“She kept the room ready for you,” Louisa tells Jesse, leaning back with the child balanced on her hip. “Just in case, she always said. It’s still upstairs, if you wanna have a look before you leave, but it’s a bit run down now. Keep meanin’ to refurbish it, but y’know how it is, never enough time for half of the stuff that needs doing. Sweetie, _no_ , don’t pour dish soap into the plants,” she adds in a moan, running off to stop her other granddaughter from cheerfully assassinating every houseplant on the premises.

Jesse gets an odd look on his face but moves out into the hallway and up the stairs, briefly hooking his fingers into Hanzo’s sleeve as if that’s needed to pull him along. He follows Jesse up the stairs and to a door Jesse picks out with no hesitation. He opens the door and steps inside.

“Well… shit,” Jesse says, standing in the middle of the floor and looking around.

The room is small but cosy, the sloped ceiling giving it the feeling of a safe hideaway spot, with a window that lets in enough light to avoid any sense of claustrophobia. Like most spaces Jesse inhabits over any length of time it is slightly worn down but tidier than you’d expect and well kept, only a few books left stacked on the desk and covered in dust.

Jesse touches the poster over the bed, metal fingers smoothing down the faded, fraying edges of it.

“You never told me exactly why you left,” Hanzo says carefully. “I gathered you ended up in some kind of trouble, but you were not specific.”

Glancing over his shoulder at him Jesse says: “Oh. I never told you that part? Huh. Guess there ain’t that much to it, really. Me and Ashe, we, uh. We killed someone. No. No, _I_ did. She gave me the tip, but I was the one who was dumb enough to…” He bites his lip. “Accident, really, I didn’t mean to. Got unlucky, both of us, though I guess him more than me. Ain’t much difference in the end; dead is dead, no matter how you cut it.”

“Well, you _have_ told me about him. If memory serves this was the grown man who tried to bludgeon you to death when he discovered you stealing two hundred dollars and a gun,” Hanzo says dryly. “What a tragic loss to society.”

Jesse chuckles. “Yeah, see, in my experience law enforcement don’t tend to take ‘I know this looks bad, officer, but you’ll be relieved to hear he had it coming’ as well as you’d expect, all told.”

“Perhaps they should endeavor to be more open minded about these things,” Hanzo says. “I have done enough jobs that felt like I was providing pest control more than anything. Though I suppose that could be a case of skewed statistics — very few men who are rich and inconvenient enough for someone to approach someone like me about them are good men.”

“True,” Jesse concedes. “You get to see a weird cross section of humanity in our line of business. The ass end, mostly.”

He sits down on the edge of the bare mattress on the bed, glancing around like a man who’s entered a room and forgotten what he was doing.

“So that’s mostly why I left. I was scared that if the guy had any, y’know… friends, they’d track me down to her place and — she was a tough old lady, but I couldn’t… ”

“I understand,” says Hanzo, who has usually been the man people have tried to protect their loved ones against. Not that they would have needed to, unless those loved ones were also part of his contract; his family has always considered it a scandalous faux pas to kill anyone you haven’t been paid for. It is a poor businessman who keeps handing out free samples willy nilly.

“There’s some other stuff too, but, uh. I’ll tell you later, once we’re out of here.”

Hanzo nods — he understands the urge to gain some distance first, so it can be safely between just the two of them, without the weight of the past contained in this place bearing down on the conversation.

Jesse leans forward and rests his elbows against his knees, his fingertips pressing together. “By the way, that guy I’d been runnin’ from in the first place, before I got here? Turned out someone else had killed him at some point in those two years anyway, didn’t even get that satisfaction. Bit of an anticlimactic end to that whole subplot, to be honest.”

“Someone should have a word with whoever is directing this mess,” Hanzo agrees wryly, though only half in jest. There have been enough times in his life when the disorganized, incoherent cruelty of the world has seemed a personal insult, and the disorder more so than the cruelty. One is expected and can thus be planned for; the other, by its very nature, is not. He always did prefer to know what he is up against. Genji used to ridicule him for it when they were young, and doesn’t anymore.

Jesse looks at the nightstand, the poster on the wall, the books on the desk. “...dunno what I meant to achieve by coming here now. Not like she was going to be here anyway, already knew she was gone.”

Hanzo steps in close and reaches out to cup the back of Jesse’s head in his hand. Jesse leans his forehead against Hanzo’s chest and wraps his arms around his waist, makes a small sound when Hanzo strokes his hair with slow, soothing motions.

“Guess it sorta always felt like… like she was gonna be here forever, no matter where I managed to land my stupid ass,” Jesse says, muffled into Hanzo’s shirt. “Even if I never came back here.”

Despite an entire childhood crafted for the singular purpose of preparing him for taking on his father’s responsibilities one day, it had still seemed some fundamental shock when his father died, like the bedrock of the world had crumbled and sent everything else out of balance. Like the impossible had happened and Hanzo’s hands felt hopelessly inadequate, incapable of joining the shattered pieces of reality back together again. “I think I know what you mean.”

Jesse is warm against him, fingers curled into Hanzo’s shirt.

“I just keep thinkin’ — what if I’d never left, y’know? Would that have been better?”

Hanzo’s hands do not falter. “Perhaps. But if you hadn’t, I might never have met you. Allow me to be extremely selfish about this one thing.”

Jesse laughs and takes a moment to fully bury his face in Hanzo’s chest, breathing in deeply through his nose. “Yeah, that’s true. Might’ve taken me longer to find you, if I’d had to run around bein’ a farm hand at the same time.”

Hanzo gives a huff of laughter in return and tries not to think about it too much — does not give in to that inner voice whispering that Jesse would have been better off in that theoretical other world, having never met Hanzo in the first place — by dint of long practice, and because he remembers the look in Jesse’s eyes that one time Hanzo had voiced the thought out loud. He never means to see that bone deep fear there ever again. If one of the forces he has to fight to make it so is himself, so be it. He is not leaving him.

“I love you,” he tells him quietly, and Jesse makes another small sound and leans his cheek against his chest, tightening his arms around his waist.

 

— — — — —

 

“Hey, ma’am,” Jesse tells the headstone, clutching his hat in his hand, pressing it against his chest. “...I’m sorry I’m late. Hah. I feel like you’d have a joke for that one. Somethin’ about beating me to it.”

In the quiet of the cemetery there’s the sound of birds chirping somewhere nearby, a breeze rustling the leaves of the trees and moving the light clouds that lend a hint of melancholy to the horizon. It’s a beautiful day.

“Got my partner with me, just over there, waiting by that tree, he’s. Uh. He’s real… I think you’d like him. He’s pretty no-nonsense too. No one else I’d want watching my back, and god knows I’m watching his until they put us both in the fu — fricking ground.” He feels the smile bloom on his face like a dandelion, indomitable and irresistible, liable to grow clean through concrete. “Y’know, that thing you told me about your wife? How the world looked different when she was around? You were right. I knew it when it happened.”

He shifts a little, scratches the back of his neck.

“Talked to your daughter before coming here, by the way. Sounds like the two of you worked things out. That’s good. Her grandkids seemed real sweet. I… think she misses you. That’s what I gathered, anyway. Of course we don’t exactly know each other very well.”

The smile falters on his face, his resolve wobbling.

“...the house doesn’t smell the same anymore.”

_C’mon, man, stop with the stalling._

He takes a deep breath. “Well. I thought you should know — weren’t your fault, that I took off like that. You had no way of knowing… remember when we talked about getting a gun, and how I said it was fine, what we agreed? I know you knew I wasn’t bein’ completely honest there, but you had no way of knowing the extent of it. I was so scared, ma’am. Could barely sleep, all I could think about was if someone came and… Had some strange notion that I had it coming, like some judgment from the universe, since I’d turned raider myself once or twice at that point. Felt like it could never be okay until I had a gun again, because then at least I could do _something_ if it happened.” He thinks about it. “Probably what I would have ended up doing was get shot, like you said, I was just one angry frightened kid. But it wasn’t really about the logic of it anymore, at that point. You know how it goes.”

He swallows.

“Should’ve just talked to you about it. Just — told the truth, straight out, for once in my damned life. Not like you’d ever given me any reason to think you’d really get angry or throw me out or whatever I imagined would happen if I brought it up again. The past gets stuck in you in some weird ways sometimes, I guess. And in the end I didn’t say anythin’, but I just couldn’t _rest_ until… so I got back in touch with Ashe and she gave me the tip and the rest is shitty history. Almost managed to convince myself it was for the best while we got Deadlock up and running. Like I would’ve just brought trouble and grief down on you somehow anyway, if I’d stayed. Don’t rightly know now, and I guess it’s too late to… Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

The smooth polished grey of her headstone reflects the sun in piercing glints. There’s a piece of a leaf stuck to it, he notices; he conscienciously picks it off and flicks it away. Now for the part that’s fresher, the regret still raw around the edges after he found out she was gone. Oh well, no point in stopping now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“I know I should’ve come back sooner, once I went more or less straight. I just…” He bites his lip. “I was too ashamed, I guess. Thought I wouldn’t be able to look you in the eye, after running off and makin’ you worry like that and… and with blood on my hands. More every day, it seemed. Like you’d believed in me somehow, and I’d proven it all wrong when I killed that guy, even if I didn’t mean to that time. Pretty stupid, huh? Don’t reckon you’d have…”

He trails off. It still holds some tinge of inevitability in his mind, the idea that he would have turned to violence at some point anyway, or else it would simply have tracked him down and come to him; in the moment it had somehow seemed like resisting it would be as much use as trying to deny gravity.

“I did a lot of bad stuff. I’m still tryin’ to make up for at least some of it. And I can’t even really take credit for that, it’s — there were a lot of people involved in giving me that second chance in the first place. Most of ‘em are dead now, and I don’t know that I ever really told them thanks. Guess you’d know a thing or two ‘bout that, huh. But I wanted — I needed to tell you…”

There’s a slight breeze, ruffling through his hair like gentle fingers. He takes a deep breath.

“It made a difference,” Jesse says, letting his fingers brush against the smooth stone. “What you did. In the end, it did. I thought you should know that. No idea what history’s going to say about either of us when all’s said and done, but it made all the difference to me, those years. That has to matter. Thank you.”

He closes his eyes, feels the touch of the sun warm and light on the back of his neck. He’s waited to say those words for so long, held them cradled between his ribs like birds in a cage, and now they’re out. He hopes someone’s listening, somewhere, who knows about birds.

“I’ve got some business I need to see to,” he says eventually, smiling a little. “No rest for the wicked. But I’ll be back when I can, ma’am. Tell everyone I said hi, would you?”

He stops for a moment before he moves away, his attention snagging on a detail. The headstone next to hers reads:

_Amy McDougal Sanchez,_

_Devoted mother, beloved wife_

_Historian of light_

He rolls the sleeve of his shirt down over the metal forearm and wipes at his face, takes some breaths. Then he walks over to where Hanzo is standing in the shade of a tree, looking at home in the shadows but stepping out into the light when he sees Jesse approaching.

“Hey,” Jesse says. “Think I’m done.”

Hanzo makes a sound of acknowledgement. He reaches out to straighten the collar of Jesse’s shirt and then lets his hand linger there before sliding it down to rest on his chest.

“Should we start to head back?” Hanzo asks.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Jesse sighs, but leans close to tuck his face into the sure strong curve of Hanzo’s neck. Hanzo winds one arm around his waist and lets the other drape over his shoulders to stroke his hair, and it’s like nothing else, the way his body knows it’s safe when they’re touching like this. He would have said ‘let’s go home’, except… well. It’s not a place, is it.

After a while Hanzo brushes his lips against Jesse’s temple and pulls back enough to look at his face.

“Actually, I meant to… give me a moment?”

“Sure,” Jesse says, surprised. Hanzo presses a reassuring kiss to his wrist and smiles before moving to retrace Jesse’s steps, walking over to the grave. Once he gets there he bows his head respectfully and stands still for a moment before speaking.

He stays there a couple of minutes. Jesse can just barely pick up the tail end of what he’s saying at this range, carried on a breath of wind.

“Thank you,” Hanzo says. “For finding him. I — hm. Will take it from here, in your stead.”

When he returns to Jesse he tilts his head to the side as if in a question and Jesse nods.

“Let’s get back to it,” Jesse says. “People to save, bad guys to shoot, unappreciated heroics to pull off. The work never ends, does it. And at the end of it all they’ll probably add another few thousand to my bounty again for destruction of property or somethin’ because I saved a busload of orphans but not the bus, that’s how things usually go for me these days.”

Hanzo snorts, watching him with a strange warm focus. He takes the hat and gently places it on Jesse’s head, pushing it back a bit with a finger under the brim to see his face better. “So long as you are here,” he says, cradling Jesse’s cheek in his hand. “There is no one I would rather face it with.”

HIs voice is smooth and deep with amusement, eyes crinkled with the smile. It’s enough to make a man feel a little dizzy.

Jesse covers Hanzo’s hand on his cheek with his own and turns his face to press a soft kiss to the center of his palm.

“Okay,” he says hoarsely. “Let’s go maybe make some history.”

He links their fingers as they start walking towards the rental car, birds flitting overhead.

 

 

END

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Believe it or not I started this literal years before Ashe was revealed; her comment about finding him on a farm was just a fortuitous cherry on top. (Mrs. Sanchez is first mentioned in [Have You Tried Baking](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12178191), by the way!)
> 
> Many, many thanks for the beta to [callmesherly](http://callmesherly.tumblr.com/) and [ Freebooter4ever ](http://freebooter4ever.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, and to the latter also for answering my dumb questions about deserts *and* for making me realize how just… unsettlingly *long* donkeys can be! The stuff of nightmares. Any remaining weirdness is completely on me haha
> 
> Also I gave future!Overwatch America free universal health care and a lot fewer guns because honestly you guys deserve a fucking break haha


End file.
